Strike Eagle's gap fixings

Sealing the openings

My earlier self would've started painting the model as it was and not really cared about the tiny gaps and extra edges here and there. Age had done its tricks to me and I was gently suffering from the irregularities and pointless holes, so I was going to close them up.

The cockpit canopy

First step was to seal the cockpit using white glue on the cockpit edges and the canopy edges. I started with the solidly installed small front glass, and after a moment of setting I started installing the larger part in its place. Enough glue was used to make the cockpit paint-safe but little enough to prevent the glue from spreading everywhere in an ugly manner.

Plastic putty

Sometime last year I bought a tube of Vallejo's Plastic Putty and I had already tried it out on the armpits of the Nebeltruppen but I may not have mentioned it at all at the time. This was the first supposedly proper time I tried the product. I tried to be cautious with the amounts, using it to fill up the most bothersome gaps that annoyed my eyes, and each of the installation holes that I was not going to use.

At this point I noticed that the arrester hook was in a completely wrong place in the middle of the belly. I had been wondering at the image in the instructions and misunderstood it badly. Luckily it came off without violence and I got to glue it in the correct place. What had been wrong with me last week?

My sealing job wasn't perfect and I could imagine a fanatical airplane modeler going ballistic with this kind of foolishness. Sad stuff.

Cleaning with water

With some goo spread around I started cleaning up the biggest clumps of it with an old, tap water -wet paintbrush. Clearly I could've done this in smaller batches, some of the plastic putty had set so well that it took a good amount of poking to reactivate. The next photo showed that despite it I had gotten a good amount of the excesses cleaned up from the underwings.

On a second spin-around I found a couple of places I had missed earlier, so I did some touching up and left the remains to be mechanically removed some other evening. I didn't take any photos of that part, so the next stage was going to be priming.