Progress shots from yesterday:
The 1/144 Cobra Company resin ERCO nose ball turret in place. When the transparency is in place, you won't be able to see much of the opening behind it. Not sure where the gun barrels are from the original conversion kit, but those are easy crafted from styrene rod. You can see the flight deck is gonna need some work.
Side view of the ERCO turret. I may need to some touch up sanding work to improve the way the sidewalls fair into the rest of the fuselage. If I still have the motivation, I may add a spray guard below the nose turret.
Dry fit of all the major assemblies. It's always great to get this point in a build when you can start to flesh out what you've had visualized in your head. I may decide to stick with the tall single tail as opposed to kitbashing a twin tail assembly. While the Consolidated PB2Y Coronado had twin tails, the even larger Martin PB2M/JRM Mars had a single tail. I may go with some of the features of the Mars like adding smaller cantilevered struts off the floats. There'll be a radar in a "doghouse" fairing above the flight deck which should help camouflage the seam work I needed to do there. The Catalina waist blisters will go behind the wing (obviously) but now jugging what to do about the rest of the defensive armament. I was going to add the B-29's tail gun position under the vertical fin plus a dorsal turret from the Minicraft B-24 kit. The PB4Y Privateer in its later variants had two dorsal turrets, I thought about doing that as well.
I thought about adding a gun turret just aft of each inboard nacelle on the tops of the wing, but that may require more slinging of putty than I want to do as I'll need to a lot of work on the wing/fuselage junctions and possibly the tail gun position depending upon what I did there.
I was reading that the waist turrets on the Privateer when depressed fully downward converged on a point 30 feet below the aircraft which meant that the ventral ball turret could be dispensed with. I'll need to position the Catalina blisters to try and replicate the same effect.
Also now thinking about options for the weapons bay. I was originally going to build bomb bays into the wings, but then I thought with as large as the PBK-1 Tarpon is, I could do it Sunderland style with doors on the sides of the fuselage that open up to rails under the wings that torpedoes, bombs, and mines could be rolled out onto for dropping. I'll need to figure something out before I attach the wing assembly for good.
I loves me the holiday weekends, I can get lots of building done.
