Revell 1/144th Airbus Beluga Construction
It would have been damn near impossible to eliminate the seam on the inside of the engine nacelles with the engines assembled and the fans in place. I decided to cut off the area in front of the fans so that they could be filled and sanded more easily then glued on after the nacelle halves were assembled. This was pretty easy and well worth it as unsightly seams would have been very obvious in the large intakes.
Areas that were to be finished in Metalizers were masked off with Bare Metal Foil and Blue Tack before the Halford's White was sprayed on the rest of the nacelles. Cardboard disks sealed the engine fans to prevent getting overspray on them. Curiously, some of the moulds looked like they hadn't been finished properly by Revell - there were noticeable striations in the pastic of many parts. It almost looked like they had forgotten to polish the moulds after cutting them. The areas that were to be natural metal on the engines were some of the worst for this (of course they would be, wouldn't they?!) so they had to be sanded and polished to smooth them out for the metal finish.
Test fitting the wings revealed them to have a silly amount of dihedral so .010" x .020" plastic strips were glued on the tops of the wing roots to correct this.
The two streamlined lumps were moulded on one fuselage half which made seam filling around them a bit of a bitch. I sanded these off completely then replaced them with scratchbuilt items after I was happy with the fuselage seam. The grossly overscale panel lines are evident here. Several more coats of primer did little to reduce them.
Back to Beluga Main Page