OlCabour's Hangar

• The pilots and cockpits are painted. The color of the fold of their clothes are heavily accentuated in order to be viewable once the pilots will be installed in their cockpit, canopy closed. (I'm not happy with my photos here, it makes the impression that it is badly painted, it's much nicer by eye !)

• On the two ventral rectangles, that look like aircraft landing gear well, the details are undersized, so I sanded them and then re-created bigger ones using brass rods and plastic strip.

• On the gun barrels, the triangular parts are removed and replaced with scratch to better look like to the aircraft landing gear shock absorber they certainly came from on the studio model.

• The alignment of the guns with the wing is incorrect : the cartridge-shaped portion of the barrel is too far back from the edge of the wing, where it should be aligned. To correct this, simply cut the plug on the wing.

By the way, it is best to give a little more thickness to the sheet, to avoid having the guns to play when gluing.

Before | After

Before | After

• Each cockpit is glued into a fuselage half and then a wedge is added to secure it.

The fuselages are then finally closed and the air intakes added. After generous sanding (it is really a kit from the 80's...), setting up strips (plastic card, U-shaped strips) on the top of the fuselage, and details on the ventral side.

• the wing roots are detailled with plastic strips, which also hide the horrible joint lines.

• Same operation have to be done at the base of the fin, which here prevents it from being in direct contact with engine module (another error of the kit).

• The front air intakes receive, for one, the photoetched part from the upgrade kit (it needed some sanding along the edge to fit properly), and the other by a piece of plastic covered by a electric razor screen.

• Curiously, the modelers of Galactica did not find a tube with a proper milling to use for the nozzles of the Viper, so they did took floors from panzer (or rail gun type like Leopold) models and shaped it around a bare tube !

This explains why the milling of the nozzles presents unusual details, with recessed rectangles in the milling, or added elements to hide holes in the original part. Obviously, Monogram and Revell missed this. Leveling down a rectangle in the milling is not hard to do, just care to avoid a disaster. For the added details, I sliced ​​strips in a 1/72 T34 Russian tank track.

• As it is always a nightmare to glue thermoformed canopy, this time I will going to help myself using the opaque original part of the kit as a frame. Hopefully, this will ensure a good bonding to the fuselage. I also try to keep the vertical mounts, to strengthen the thermoformed part.

To remove the unnecessary faces, I just followed smoothly the edges of the mounts with a plastic cutter and a mini saw. This done, I realized that the thermoformed part has a different height and a slightly different angle, so I finally need to adapt this frame in order for it to do the job I want it to do...

The solution provided by MMI to attach the back of the thermoformed canopy did not convinced me, so I filled it with plastic card.