Sword Lightning T5

The kit comes with Eduard PE, including this great looking control panel.
I once tried sitting in a Lightning T5, and I couldn’t get my backside on the seat because my knees were touching the control panel 

The injection moulded seats are heavily augmented with the included photo etch. Here is the basic seat next to a completed one.  

Just like the real thing, it’s a bit of a cramped situation in the cockpit tub 

Another picture of the tub. The seats are a real squeeze, especially when the PE straps are attached to the sides of the seat bucket 

Radar bullet/nose gear bay filled with weight, glued together and set in place. The fitting of these parts was fiddly. The radar bullet needed special attention to get the parts flush. There’s no real locating pins or tabs for fitting the whole assembly in to the fuselage half. I had to get rid of some ejection pin marks right near the intake opening too 

In goes the cockpit tub. There was some guess work and a fair bit of fettling to get this to sit right. Typical limited run kit kind of stuff, but nothing to serious. There’s no locating tan for the lower engine compressor face, but the instructions give you a measurement for how far back the piece should fit 

Glueing the fuselage halves together. This took some time and patience. Of course, the kit has no locating pins and I’m pretty certain the two halves differ in length ever so slightly 

Fuse halves together, and both wings constructed minus the flaps. The tail is a separate piece and there was a bit of a step at the forward join, so out came the filler 

Wings on. The locating tabs for these were too big for the slots in the fuselage, so I had to do some ‘editing’ to get them to fit. There were some fairly substantial gaps at the joins which I filled with Miliput White smoothed over with a damp cotton bud 

The next problem was the instrument coaming. Something isn’t right in the design of the kit. The coaming that comes with the kit wouldn’t fit over the top of the instrument panel, it wasn’t deep enough to reach the side of the cockpit opening. Plus, the forward canopy then wouldn’t sit in place. I manufactured a very rudimentary coaming out of plasticard that had different geometry to the kit piece. It’s probably not accurate, but it fits and the forward canopy can sit over the top of it. Here it is before I put the top piece in place 

Despite the canopy now fitting over the coaming, there is a fairly significant step between the fuselage and the canopy 

Here is the step viewed from the side. I applied some Vallejo filler but this wasn’t going to be enough so 

…out came the Miliput again! I built up the area leading up to the canopy to eliminate the step 

And here it is viewed from the side. Next step will be to shape the Miliput