Painting - Day 4 and Midnight Madness

June 18, 2009

Boy, they sure gave me A LOT of extra hardware! That is a good thing, but I was finding screws and bolts to things that I don't know where they would go!

While my half-painted retractable landing gear P-51 needed to sprout landing gear, so today that was the goal.

Additionally, I wanted to finish the 5-block landing gear thing with the dowels hanging out. That wasn't too bad, but my Dremel and crappy drill were slowing progress on getting the hole depths correct. Sanding the angles in the dowels was with the belt sander on it's side.

The landing gear itself is not hard to put together, but go with the plans on the assembly, since the way I went seemed more difficult. I installed the height-adjustment pieces, followed by the axle. This made it somewhat difficult to install, but possible.

The wheels, wheel pants, and associated hardware are straight forward and unremarkable.

I decided to forgo the ply ring prescribed in the plans in favor of just screwing the "hub caps" on the wheel. I nearly destroyed my Dremel doing this, the PMG shifted inside of the dremel from the heat generated to the point that it would not freely turn. I thought I had seized the tool, my brand-new Dremel.

After all of that, I started finishing the rest of the lettering. About 3 hours later, all the lettering was on.
Dreading the checkers, I started at 9pm and finished the last black square around 2 am. Cutting the square black pieces was tedious, but I pressed on.

Finishing the checkers, I went on to the tail number (463684). Using the 4 in the decal kit, I cut out the numbers to what I would think they would have been. I was unsuccessful finding my pictures of the numbers.

This close to being completed, how can I stop here?

Breaking out the fine artist brush, i outlined "Double Trouble Two" with red paint like the original, and using black and yellow only, and no practice, I painted the witch on both sides. I can draw pretty well, and I was pleased with the finished witch.

Wow, a Mini "Double Trouble Two" is sitting in my living room! All that is left is to drop in the steering stuff, put the pedals and friction gear on and it's done! Not a lot of pictures taken, but everything for the most part was straight forward.