"End Of An Era" XH134 WIP #2

Progress on XH134 has been surprisingly rapid for me. It is hard to think that I am just over a week into this project and I am almost ready to start painting the model.

At the end of the last post of this project, I was talking about the amount of nose weight that was needed for these Canberra's. Yes, you do need this amount of weight. Once the tailplanes and rudder were added, the balance was completely changed and the said 45 grammes of weight is required. For nose weight, I am using up some old white metal ingots I have had lying around for many years now. The weight I measured out would not fit into the space where Airfix said to put it, so you will see in the photos below how I placed the white metal in the fuselage.

The fuselage is now ready for painting. After a couple of coats of primer, it highlighted the remaining joint lines and blemishes that needed to be finished off. So these were dealt with tonight with some Tipex and wet sanded. I hope this will be it but I will not see until tomorrow when I give the model another coat of primer.

One thing I did notice tonight was that a panel line did not continue pass the observation window on one side of the fuselage. This line does on the other side, so I will need to check some photos of the 1:1 aircraft and correct if needed. It is a shame I did not realise this when I built XH135, so this might need to be corrected to.

So, the next stage is to touch up the primer on the fuselage, then primer all of the remaining parts and start painting them.