Made in France - multi-genre

Thank you Olivier.
Yes I have noticed the rear compartment is different.
Also the area between the 2 front seats, do not glue parts 81 and 33.
I have thought to make a support for a PR4G radio instead of.
I have seen your built on “Maquette Garden”, great work, I especially like the extra work and you have made a clear pic of the front underneath who shows how to manage with Revell and Blast Models parts. :+1:

Dry fitted the wing assm. to the fusalage and got this gap on both sides


After a long while of carving/scraping/sanding on the wing and mainly the fusalage opening I was able to get it to this. I’ll fill and sand the remaining gap Wednesday

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That’s annoying. Did you try to use clamps to minimize the gaps while the glue is curing?

Olivier

I tried to squeeze them together but they would not, so I started to carve away at points where there was mold seam flash until I got it to fit. The subject is interesting but the quality is questionable.

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Renault si ready for some primer. How was the built ? Dissapointing. Let the huge gap in the frontal armour speak for itself. For the record im NOT going to fill it. The plan is to slap on a lot of mud to hide all the bad spots.

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This gap is suprising because it is not seen on other builts. I wish you a good continuation with your model.

@Naseby and @terminator

Several reviews have cited issues here due to the number of parts that must be aligned exactly right, but there is no strong locating aids to assist the modeller. Depending on how the modeller addresses the location of the parts, a gap can appear in any of several places. Another example from a video showing an issue:
image

All that said, with some basic testing before gluing, you can get this kit together without too much heartache. The real issue is the kit instruction order. Kits are designed by engineers, not modellers and so are instructions… I found that you need to ignore the order of steps Meng gives you and fit the doors first, not last, so you can get a much better fit overall.

The hinges on the driver’s doors are the only parts that have a firm location position to the hull. Tape them together and tape them to the hull and use that as your location guide for everything else. With the doors in place, fit the front plate (B12) to its location up to the doors. Then add the triangular fillets (A14 & A17) to the hull sides, up to the doors. Insert the side vision ports (A15 & A16) to these fillets and hull sides and use these to ensure the roof top, and hull side panels are correctly lined up. Then add the rectangular plate (A4) to the upper hull and to the side vision ports - trim off the tab at the rear and sand a little off each end for best fit (which is what the video modeller did not do, hence the gap he has). Lastly add the front vision port hatch (B7) and if done right, you will have no gaps at all:

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Jacob. Just some feedback which I hope will be useful for future builds.

Flat pack hulls must be perfectly aligned or issues will develop later - this is the most important aspect here. It appears your hull is slightly out of alignment. To test your alignment tape as many parts as you can to the hull and check fit. You can sometimes use the taped parts to help pull sides into the correct position, etc, whilst the glue dries.

The driver’s hatch doors should be the same length, your right door is longer than the left, very noticeable in your pic (see 1). It seems you may have sanded the part of the door that fits up to the front plate (2) for fit? This is a big clue as to your hull issue.

With the hull sides and roof now out of alignment, the rest of the fit becomes a problem. The side visor plate should fit over the triangular fillet so its leading edge is sitting on the point of the triangle. You have set it too far back to get the rear edge and top edge to align with your hull - hence the gap (3). Yes there is a tab at the back to help align these, but the fit of the tab is very sloppy and the parts can be fitted well out of alignment if the modeller does not realise this.

The top edge of the vision panel should be in line with the top of the hull side, but yours sits higher at the rear and leads to the gap at the back of the fillet (4) in your best effort to get the parts to fit.

So because your doors are short to compensate for the twist, the side visor panels are set too far back and the rectangular piece with the front visor hinges is therefore also set too far back to mate with the side panels, the visor is also too far back, leaving the gap.

Please do not take this as a criticism, I have been in the same boat in the past. This is just passing on some of the wisdom I havegained from my own mistakes, in the hope you end up make fewer than I did in future!

Cheers.

Thanks for the comments. I think you are absolutely right. I did also comment on the poor construction choise and I think small errors did multiply and I ended up with a huge gap. Interestingly Im currently also building the Otter from IBG which has a complex hull construction aswell. However there are no issues here… edit: the roof is not glued on yet …



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I have built that kit too. The big difference is everything on the Otter is rectangular butt fit, as opposed to Meng’s many angles, tapers and bevelled edges.

I did a bit of work to correct the IBG kit faults, which also meant the kit door and flap parts had to be cut and shortened, fillets added to the hull to compensate, etc, and when the weld beads were added it meant the fit would not be an issue for me anyway. In case you are interested - some of my in progress shots:






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Nice work. For me the point was that the direct comparison of the fit of the angled parts of these two kit felt so different. I was expecting fit issues on the Otter and there were none (except for the cooler flaps). I didnts expect any issues on the more expensive and famous Renault. Its just that feeling that the kit isnt what it should be. Im not saing its bad. It just wasnt fun.

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Blocked on every other build (Am I really out of Tamiya XF-65 Field Gray?) and still with some quality time I decided it was time to start cutting sprues for the Super Etendard. Here are a few bits:

There are some pretty serious knock out holes on the three landing gear bay bits in the center and some will be hard to fill I fear. Also have the two fuselages halves cut out. Will get some primer down on those too.

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Sanded down the rod I used to fill the wing gap and added the tail planes

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Stevie, nice job. Looks good - worth the effort in my mind.

Looking forward to see more :slight_smile:

Sanded and primed. Tomorrow I plan to start painting the color scheme.


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Painted the rudder white because there is no white stripe on the decal sheet


The first of the three top colors

Masking for the second top color complete

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Stevie, nice job. Looks good - worth the effort in my mind.

Looking forward to see more :slight_smile:

Now I understand that the blue color for the tank is not correct. I apologize to all the French.

And this color completely scored the pre-shading.

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Not your fault. Amusing Hobby invented this color. I’d love to see the tank with the national cockade. After WW2 those cockade were no longer in use on ground vehicles.
Enjoy your second paint job!
Olivier

The second top color coat sprayed on. The kit instructions call the color out as “chocolate” so I used Tamiyas XF-10. It does look about the color of a Hershey bar. Just got back to the bench after I got a couple face fulls of second hand cigarette smoke. Coughed, sneezed and wheezed for almost a week.


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