M4000 in progress

The wheel well walls are multi-piece affairs. Some care has to be taken when glueing the parts but they fit nice and are adorned by some really nice details.

The wheel well walls are multi-piece affairs. Some care has to be taken when glueing the parts but they fit nice and are adorned by some really nice details.

Exhaust cans are deep and even feature turbine blades which will never be seen again in the depths behind the afterburner flameholders.

A little dry fit of the lower fuselage moulded together with wing inserts and the wing halves themselves. I was having a bit of a hard time here - I had to sand the inner sides of the wing inserts first to improve the fit. This helped erradicate the leadi

In the end, I've decided for an easier route - looking at reference photos, I noticed that its flaperons dropped, while the aircraft was parked - bring out the CMK saw and scribers and I simply cut the flaperons away. Dealing with that nasty seam is now m

Wings attached nicely to the fuselage and only a little clean up was required. Same goes for the splitter plates and shock cones.

The tail is two-piece affair... nothing special - some seam cleanup required at the top and I've added a piece of styrene to strengthen the join with the main fuselage.

Burner cans are made of two pieces - exterior details is a little faint but so is on a real aircraft. Some careful painting should brighten them up. The only problem is that the burner cans had 6 attachment points and one molding defect on the inner rim.

Finally in primer and ready for some paint!

The kit supplied masks for the Red and Black were of a lot of help. However the masks for the transition from the intakes to the canards weren't as good and had to be replaced with Tamiya Masking tape.