Wednesday 18 June 2014

Chinook - Adding seats and gluing fingers together

The hull consists of three pieces : the bottom, left and right. There's actually a fourth piece - the outside bottom - but I wouldn't call it's fit even remotely acceptable. Filling and sanding will be needed, but that's a problem for later.
There are no locator pins, holes or even small tabs, so it's a bit guessing how it goes together. Overall fit on the parts seems not to have been a big concern in this kit, but I'll do my best.

To make sure the fit remains as good as possible, I glued the right side to the bottom and clamped it all up with the left side as well, but without any glue to it. I left it for a day, to be 100% sure. Then I removed the left half and added the seats inside. The result is to my liking.The height of my scratch-build seats was spot-on and the top bar fit perfectly in the designated groove.

 

So, with the right side done, I had to decide to mirror the other half or to do something else and I decided to go for a row of bunk stretchers, to transport patients. On the far end, I wanted to add some stacked crates, just for the hell of it.

The styrene sheets I have are REALLY thin (.005" - or 0.13mm if you believe the metric system is the future), rendering them absolutely useless for creating anything box shaped.
I decided to use an old credit card. Of course, this kind of plastic cannot be welded together with plastic cement, so we resort to good old CA glue. I had forgotten how I hate working with this, and in no time, my fingers were firmly stuck together.
Some pulling, cutting (yes, I cut my fingers apart - carefully!) and a surprisingly wide range of strong language later, I figured I needed several extra hands, only to realize shortly after that I HAVE an extra pair of hands, which I bought for my attempts at soldering stuff together (which I should really get around to doing anytime soon, but I digress).

So, without any more problems, I created two boxes and glued them together. Some extra styrene strips finished the load and it's ready for painting. To be continued ...



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