Hogstruction

Action!

After a few weeks of not modeling I sat down and dug my tools into pieces of plastic. Because doing everything always the same way, in the same order is boring, I took a slightly different approach to this protohog. To make painting and decaling supposedly easier I decided, that the cockpit would be completed before it was taken off its sprue. Only the joysticks I skipped at this point, because they'd be only in the way of just about everything.

My idea was this: attach the seats, attach the instrument panels. The next time I'd prime it, the following time do the decals(!). After that nothing would prevent the sticks from being installed and this important subassembly from being crammed inside the airframe.

Initially I was almost gluing the bottom part of the cockpit / front landing gear wheel well under the cockpit setup, but then I figured out that it'd be much smarter to glue that part onto the GAU-8 piece instead. This way it'd be already aligned and when inserting the cockpit interior it'd be a classic plug and play operation. In t he second photo the aforementioned wheel well -setup is curing and being aligned inside the airframe, without being glued onto the airframe part yet.

To finish up my short stint I glued the wings together. Those pieces were hell-bent on grimacing like the Joker himself, so I pegged them down. In these cases I trust those much more than plain tape, based on previous experiences.

The plan

In case my order of assembly seems confusing, my idea is and will be to make the priming as easy as possible, as far as the model assembly is concerned. The simplest subassemblies that can be primed with the fewest painting sessions. As the airframe's top and bottom parts will require two sessions in any case, I can't get better than that, but I shall work on making those then only ones taking that many. If the rest are done with just a single spraying, I'd be a happy camper.