Thank you for posting these, Old Man. This really is proper modelling!
I am interested to know how you made the wings.
Thank you, Sir.
For the wings I have reverted to an old method of sanding and scraping the 'valleys' into the surface of the plastic, leaving raised 'ridges' between. Thin 'swizzle-stick' strips of sanding stick have been a great help in this. These are narrow strips of the padded emery sold as 'salon boards' in beauty sections (or as 'sanding sticks' by hobby suppliers). The strips run between 2.5mm and 3.5mm, which is a pretty good match with most 1/72 rib spacings, and come in grits ranging from very coarse to fairly fine. Mark the ribs in with pencil (best to work from the center out, rather then from one tip across to the other). Then hit the space between the lines with one of these emery strips of coarse grit, taking care to leave the pencil marks intact. Follow this by scraping with the edge of a curved blade (a #10), which smooths things down a bit. Follow this with a narrower coarse grit emery strip, and then scrape again with the blade. It is laborious but not hard, and with a little practice you can get fairly precise in the effect. Once every channel is is, you can smooth further with something like 600 grit paper, moving chord-wise, not span-wise. After this a coat of primer (I use Tamiya Fine White, but everyone has a favorite), will give you a good surface.
Scallops are cut in with a knife and regularized with a dowel wrapped in sand-paper. Rear portion of the wing surface is sanded and scraped down to get the trailing edge to a proper thin-ness. Some work will be needed on the 'valleys' in the upper surface, but most of the thinning can be done to the under-surface.
Wing were made from 1mm sheet, and cold bent to camber, with the undersurface regularized by sanding with heavy paper taped to a large pill bottle, and upper surface sanded to necessary taper to front and rear. This took very little time, about an hour for both wings (as opposed to about eight hours, and a lot more dust, when sanding an airfoil section into thick sheet).
