Eduard F-86 Sabre

Preliminary test fit. I'm going wheels up on this one. 

Pilot is assembled, cleaned up, and primed. I made a new air hose out of wound copper wire. 

The intake and exhaust had some substantial ejector pin marks. Anyone have any one piece resin replacements? 

My figure painting skills are improving, but not quite where want them to be.  

cut the control surfaces. As this is going to be in flight, I want the ailerons to be slightly askew. 

This is not what I meant when I said I wanted my ailerons slightly askew. 

Then resin ejection seat is very nice. Even with the cockpit closed up, you can probably see just enough of this to make it worth doing. 

I had to modify the stick. Basically I just attached the stick to the pilot's hand instead of to the floor. As his position is a bit off, this allowed me to push him up far enough to also have the other hand on the throttle. 

I used ultra thin CA glue to mate many of the seams. I also used a "trick" that I read about online: I glued the nose to the intake trunk first so I could work and sand that seam. it was a tight fit, but I think it will be okay with just a little sanding. 

Going gear up is going to need some filler work, but the seams were going to need sanding anyway. NMF is very unforgiving. That's why I tend to avoid NMF. 

Testing the fit of the canopy/windscreen. The canopy had a seam line and some scratches that I had to remove and polish. Both have been dipped in future.  

Assembled the canopy parts including the tiny grab handle and mirror. 

Gave most of the body a good sanding, installed the pilot, windscreen, and canopy. Ready for some masking, and some touch up.  

Does anyone know what this is? If you do, or have some pictures, I might be able to correct it. It looks pretty sloppy as is.  

Masked, mostly cleaned up, ailerons lengthened and added.  

Primer down 

painted the base yellow for the stripes. I'm going to set that aside and let it dry for a day or so, then mask those off, give it a light buff, a final coat of black primer, another buff...and we're off to Alclad. 

All day and five shades of alclad later... 

Major decals are finished on top and bottom. There are still a substantial amount of stencils remaining.  

It's not often that I get this tired of applying decals, but I'm going to set this aside for awhile.