Well after assuming I had to finish the cockpit before doing anything else, I then suddenly realised that the Cobra's cockpit is so open and accessible that I can fit most of the contents after it's assembled and painted, AND that that will make it much easier to mask. Filling it with the masked canopy isn't an attractive option because the canopy is in five pieces to allow for opening panels, so the chance of spray getting inside it would be high.
Having glued the fuselage together, I started thinking about the sling hook arrangement, and playing about with balance points, I noticed that it might well be a tail sitter (yes, even skid-equipped helo models can tail-sit). Put some weight in the nose: not enough. Put some more in the bottom of the rotor tube: still not enough. So,
yet again, I had to drill a hole, this time behind the pilot's seat, to drop steel balls into. One of these days I will do nose weight the easy way and shock myself....
Then I put the tail on, and frankly, not a great fit:
Since the FIGAS Huey is going to be disarmed, I cut a circular panel to blank off the turret. As with the rotor, the kit makes zero provision for the turret to rotate:
Note another fit issue there: the solid nose tip is too small for the opening: more sanding. (Early Cobras had landing lights in the nose, later ones had a solid nose and a retractable light under the fuselage. You can see the keyhole-shaped recess for it in the pic).
Here's another potential problem. The models is quite heavy now, and the skid attachment looks fragile. The pegs are too big for the holes and the holes arn't deep enough, so there's a distinct possibility that, in making it fit, it'll end up too loose and be prone to sagging under load. It's way too thin to drill out and reinforce too, and the curve of the struts means you wouldn't get much length of wire/rod in the the strut anyway:
Can't help feeling they missed a trick with that one. There's a panel line around the areas where the ski struts go through the fuselage, so they could have moulded left and rigth struts in one piece with the struts joined by a square-section, fuselage-width plug that fitted into a slot on the underside.
Next up, wing fittings. Cobra wings are external with continuous fuselage skin behind the wing root, broken only by a pair of brackets. However the kit has a big slot instead, so that will need to be filled and the brackets approximated. My idea is that, since the Cobra doesn't have a sling hook as standard, the FIGAS one will have a U-shaped cradle that attaches to the wing mountings and holds the hook underneath it.
