Issue 60

The big 6-0, another quickie concentrating on the frame. First off, we get a new piece of support to brace up the following bits:

Now, three new pieces of frame in the following order:

This leaves us with a big overhang which we'll go back and fix later. Meantime, we are making some serious ground.

Issue 59

(coulda swore I posted this last night. Oh well...)

59 is pretty straightforward. Just adding new bits to the upper framework in the following order:

When you're done, you have this:

This brings us to coming up the 2/3rds mark or thereabouts.

Issue 58

Issue 58 is mostly decorating body panels. Here are the bits you will need:

Starting with the long piece on the right, we add the following bits in the order shown:

Next up, the body piece on the left gets a little decoration...

...and finally, the top part (where the antenna will mount, btw) gets a detail piece (do take note of the orientation):

That's it. If you put the two parts together (don't glue them yet), you can see what it will look like.

Issue 57

Okay, big week this time around! We get to add in the electronics and test the gangplank!

First up, in goes the circuit board on the four posts in the back:

Now, we poke the little rubber "plug" for the power port out (on yours this is probably camouflaged with black "damage". I cleaned mine up--whoops!) Just push the "ring" end up and into the interior.

The ring goes around the post shown, and one of the short silver screws with the wide head is used to secure it.

Next, the port itself is attached. Make sure it is lined up so that the port is right over the hole, as shown here.

Two of the long golden screws will do this.

Now, remember how they said not to bolt down the battery box to the frame just yet? Yeah, here's why. Go ahead & plug it in to the port shown.

Next to it goes the power connection we just added.

After that, the motor connection to the gangplank.

And finally, the gangplank lights.

Power on the battery box, and find the blue switch in-line from the power connection. Turn it on, and you should get a red light on the board...

Note that the board has two buttons on it, A and B. B tests lights we don't have installed yet, but A should test the gangplank. Give it a shot.

If all goes well, you should get this...

NOTE: It may happen that your gangplank goes down and then keeps trying to go down. In which case, look at the top of the motor for the two paddles and the white "hook", shown here:

Essentially, the problem is that the top paddle should be carried down by the white hook until it makes contact with the lower paddle, which stops the ramp descent. Make sure it's tucked in under the hook, like so.

Anyway, that's it for this time. Cool stuff.

Issue 56

Whew! OK, sorry for the delay. This step required working on the painted lower hull, so I spent some time doing up the paint job on it and some nice distressing to go with it.

In the meantime, I got out all the "thrust vector actuators" and gave them nice paint jobs, as seen below. Unfortunately, I couldn't match the color quite with what I was using on the main hull, but eh.

Here, btw, is the look I'm going with for the hull:

Now, to business: first thing I do is glue down the actuators (see below). Next, there are four pairs of pieces as shown below:

They get glued together to make stabilizers, like so:

The four stabilizers are put in place like so:

Next up are the two Y-shaped braces, which go to either side of the central actuator:

Now, let's add a little more weathering...

Now, it's time to dig out some tiny pieces from past issues. First, there's these two little guys from issues 44 & 46, which go on either side of the rear engine assembly. The photo in the magazine isn't horrendously clear, so I've zoomed in:

Now comes these four parts (careful, the middle one is delicate as hell):

The two top bits go in right as shown...

The bottom saddle fits into the slot provided.

And the W-shaped bit goes on top of them.

For the next two parts, we need to go and look for these two holes on the parts immediately forward of the central turret area:

These A-frame structures are added here, with the legs going into the holes we just found.

To each side of those, we add these tiny little pipes.

And finally, the larger L-shaped pipes get added aft of the turret.

And that's it for that! Hopefully we can pick up the pace a bit now that the main paintjob is done. Looks like some interesting stuff ahead!
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