BQM-34A (Q-2C) Firebee PROGRESS

The model comes in this small box, which contains two sprues, the instructions, and a decal sheet. The instructions are nicely printed in color and provide some additional information about the drone. Decals also seem to be of good quality aswell. I bought the kit when I was in vaction on Malta in September 2024.  

Some clean-up needed to be done but nothing unusual, just some ejector pin marks and mold lines.  

Unfortunately I messed on tire up.This happens when you forget to look at your reference pictures. I thought that this groove running in the middle of the tire shouldn't be there, allthough I should have doubt that ICM would produce it this way if it didn't belong there but I stayed determined to fill this groove...
Luckly I only tried filling the groove on one of the tires. It took me quite some time to figure out how to fill it, then I needed to sand the excess away and destroyed the tire pattern. After f***ing up the tire, I took a look at some reference photos, only to see, that this groove actually belongs there...
As you can see, I tried to rescribe the tire pattern, with moderate success as you can see on the right tire...
The happy end of the story is, that I contacted ICM and today they replied to my email and the chances are good, that I will recieve a replacement part 🙂 lessons learned! 

I am really amazed at the level of engineering on this kit. In the picture you can see the inlet fan of the turbine. The placement pins and the groove on the turbine housing both are conical, this way its very hard to glue them in the wrong spot. Dryfitting should immediatley tell you, that the parts don't belong there if placed incorrectly, good job ICM! 

Inside the turbine housing there were small ejector pin marks. Nobody would see them but me being me, I had to fill them 😄 Atleast it didn't take a long time, just some Milliput, wet q-tips and they are filled. Its not important to achieve a flush filling here, just cover up the pin marks and even that is too much effort to be honest because as I said, nobody is going to look into this tiny turbine anyways.  

Finished turbine, did some light heat effects but the turbine is not very visible once the fuselage is glued togehter.