Having decided to build the Monogram Grumman Gulfhawk for the Corona Virus Theme Build, I sat down with the box and looked over all the pieces to see if I could recall why I quit working on it.
I found a spooge of some unknown substance on the underside of the top wing. I now recall that some years ago it was soft and sticky matching a similar glob in the box. I think it was a rubber band I had used when gluing the wing halves together. It reacted badly with the liquid glue. Now years later, it had hardened and was fairly easily scraped and sanded off. There was something else, so I kept looking and found one of the joints in the retractable landing gear struts had been broken. I reinforced the piece with a bit of plasticard which was drilled and pinned with brass tube. That was it, back on track now. This one is going together straight out of the box.
I primered as many parts as I could with white primer. I found a rattle can of orange paint the perfect shade. (Engine block orange good to 500 degrees.) It is slower drying than I'd like, so I'm hands off until tomorrow, the finish looks great without fingerprints.
There are a few non orange parts that need to be sprayed, so I have something to do while waiting for the rest to dry completely. There is a decal for the instrument panel and I took the opportunity to see how the sun treatment and a coat of decal film had affected the decals. Not well it seems as the decal curled right up Micro Sol helped a very little and it ended up being stuck down with several applications of Pledge. This does not bode well for the rest of the decals. Any further decals will be cut from the sheet very carefully so as to leave behind a pattern for a mask in case I have to paint the markings. This was not supposed to become a major project, but since when have good intentions mattered. I will do a search for 1:32 Gulfhawk decals, but I expect they would be few and far between.
sp
