Work continues, after a lot of humming and humphing as to how to do the gun bays. In my eagerness when I bought this kit many years back, I rushed out and bought and bought the full Big Ed package of Eduard upgrades. At the time, I had no time for modelling thanks to work commitments, but I wanted to eventually build the biggest and bestest P-47 Razorback I could.
I've since come to realise that I have neither the talent, the tools or the eyesight to mess about with all this, and I'm not much of a fan of modelling guns anyway. Plus I'd already sprayed the insides of the wings, again in my eagerness, which would need re-doing 
. There's a lot of bending in this, and as I don't have the tools to do so, this is now consigned to my spares box, which means I stand a chance of finishing this kit this year. I've walked away from this build twice, but I want to finish it now. Maybe I will be able to use some of this when Tamiya release their 1/32 P-47??????? 
So here we have all the wing bits, air brushed and ready to go together, along with the flaps ailerons and tail planes. If I'd used the photo etch, I would have needed to remove the ribs in the gun bay you can see in each wing top, the air brush again. And that's just for starters.
I assembled the guns and started painting them. Here we have a veritable forest of guns.
The gun barrel ports in the wing leading edge are a separate piece, and I decided to glue these into each lower wing to help with positioning of the guns.
After these had dried, the wing tops were glued into place, but had to be slid into place around the gun barrel ports, which was a little fiddly as there's a locating lip around the entire edge, and a locating pin adjacent on the wing.
After they had dried, I cleaned up each wing, checked the joint to the fuselage and glued them into place. The wing joint is very good, and the stub wing spars in the fuselage means setting correct dihedral is no bother at all. Well done, Trumpeter.
I put this aside to dry for a while, then set about attaching the tail planes. Trumpeter provide an elevator link rod to each elevators. This goes into a bracket on the fuselage, but they don't line up. One side is worse than the other, and this interferes with attaching the tail planes, as they won't stay in place.
So I cut them off and drilled new holes for a single elevator link rod and cut a length of 1.00mm stock rod, glued it into one side, then glued that side tail plane into place, then glued the other side on, as well as gluing the link into the elevator. Now I have elevators that work together, as they're supposed to. Here it is in test fit.
So now we have a model that looks like a plane, which is always a great stage to get to. The dihedral of the tail planes was set using ordinary sticky tape, and this is still in place as it dries. Here's a couple of shots showing where the build is now, with a 1ft ruler along side to give an idea of size. She's a biggie!!
I've set the propeller in place temporarily so you can see the full length. I've also glued in the ailerons and flaps into their final positions. That wasn't quite as straight forward as you'd think. There's a lot more work to do before I get to the painting stage, and I'm still debating about further work on the guns. The ribs in the gun bay would appear to preclude any further work, and the bullet belts kit provides are made from vinyl and look like a nightmare to paint and get into place without ruining that paint job. For me, this build was always about the co*ckpit and engine/turbo detail, and that's what I've concentrated on. I think it will still be an impressive kit without the guns being detailed.
So it's on with cleaning and filling, then the details needed to get it to the paint stage. More soon, I hope.
Cheers,
Michael
Edited by Dpgsbody55
