Thanks guys - but you might not like the next bit so much!
This is the point where I started to make some mistakes. Firstly I noticed that most Bebe’s had cabane and undercarriage struts in a metal finish, so my wood streaking had to be repainted.
Then I pored over plans in the datafile and scaled up where the control horns should pass though the elevators and marked up for drilling. I don’t like individual horns as offered on the kit’s PE sheet but prefer a single horn that passes through the aerofoil as on the real thing. Thus I fashioned horns from sheet stock and glued in place. Then something didn’t look right. Doh! I’d measured back from the hinge into the tailplane rather than the elevator and mounted the horns on the fixed surface rather than where they would actuate the control surface.
Much swearing. My fault completely but, again, if Special Hobby had given some indicator points on the elevators I would hopefully not have gone astray.
Horns removed, patched, new holes drilled, new horns installed in correct position.
Time to mount the top wing but first a coat of Winsor & Newton Galeria gloss (My go-to choice for varnish which works perfectly with pretty well all decals I have used. (hmmm….). Windshield, filler caps etc installed and decals applied.
Some trouble with the fuselage chevrons which started to disintegrate as I gently lined them up. Managed to get them all in place but with a few fragments missing. Fortunately I have a huge stock of old Humbrol tins and found that 109 “WWI Blue” matched the blue of the SH decals perfectly, so a little touching up and dry brushing rectified this completely.
Then large roundels under top wing. These just would not settle down and eventually I applied some MicroSol – disaster! Decals started to shrivel up and had to be scraped off in bits. I have the SH Nie16 kit with underwing-only roundels (which will probably be built as a Russian Nie or Dux) so these were pressed into service instead and applied with only gentle heat from a hair drier and appeared to settle fairly well. Top wing roundels applied similarly. The rudder decals just wouldn’t conform to edges so were cropped and painted in.
You can imagine, I was pretty fed up during all this and didn’t take any pictures. (One might have shown the bits flying out the window!)
Anyway, top wing and tailplane finally mounted and a bottle of white Rioja opened!
