Chinook - Closing up

For the left side of the Chinook's interior I had settled on 2 crates and a row of stretchers to carry patients. The trusty "third hand" helps hold the pieces together until the glue has set. I'm not going to bother providing straps and seatbelts.
I must say this Evergreen styrene is a joy to handle and glue. The Tamiya cement I use glues it together in seconds. That may be because the pieces are so small, I dunno.

A few days and some painting later, this last piece is ready to be installed.

I took time to take some pictures of the finished interior, because - once closed - I doubt you'll see much of it, unless I can get some really good light through the little windows.

And now it's time to close the hull up. Out come the trusty clamps and a day of patience.

The seam is big and will require work, but seems manageable (Keep reading, it get's worse)

I didn't go too sparingly on the glue. When you press the parts firmly together, some of the molten plastic will ooze out. Resis the temptation to remove it while still wet. When sanding the seams afterwards, this extra plastic should have filled all the little gaps. This way, you don't need putty anymore.

The last piece goes on the bottom. Getting the alignment right required some - or in some places a LOT of - extra strips of styrene to make it sit flush.

Here's where the overall fit proves worst (so far), so it will need a lot of filling and sanding and even more ... to get it all smooth.

And the worst part : when trying to fit the canopy, something seems off. That's not merely a gap, you can fit and arm or a leg through it (in scale).

I suspect the middle part (the floor sandwiched in between the two hull halves) sits too far forward. This is because there aren't any locator pins or tabs to get positive positioning of the parts. Now the control panel is preventing the canopy to close. Normally, if this were a simple hull not closing, you'd snip off some of the interior bulkheads until it fits, but this specific part sits behind a clear window and will remain visible.
This will require major surgery to get right. We'll addres that next time.

Chinook - Adding seats and gluing fingers together

The hull consists of three pieces : the bottom, left and right. There's actually a fourth piece - the outside bottom - but I wouldn't call it's fit even remotely acceptable. Filling and sanding will be needed, but that's a problem for later.
There are no locator pins, holes or even small tabs, so it's a bit guessing how it goes together. Overall fit on the parts seems not to have been a big concern in this kit, but I'll do my best.

To make sure the fit remains as good as possible, I glued the right side to the bottom and clamped it all up with the left side as well, but without any glue to it. I left it for a day, to be 100% sure. Then I removed the left half and added the seats inside. The result is to my liking.The height of my scratch-build seats was spot-on and the top bar fit perfectly in the designated groove.

 

So, with the right side done, I had to decide to mirror the other half or to do something else and I decided to go for a row of bunk stretchers, to transport patients. On the far end, I wanted to add some stacked crates, just for the hell of it.

The styrene sheets I have are REALLY thin (.005" - or 0.13mm if you believe the metric system is the future), rendering them absolutely useless for creating anything box shaped.
I decided to use an old credit card. Of course, this kind of plastic cannot be welded together with plastic cement, so we resort to good old CA glue. I had forgotten how I hate working with this, and in no time, my fingers were firmly stuck together.
Some pulling, cutting (yes, I cut my fingers apart - carefully!) and a surprisingly wide range of strong language later, I figured I needed several extra hands, only to realize shortly after that I HAVE an extra pair of hands, which I bought for my attempts at soldering stuff together (which I should really get around to doing anytime soon, but I digress).

So, without any more problems, I created two boxes and glued them together. Some extra styrene strips finished the load and it's ready for painting. To be continued ...