Sopwith Dolphin - Fuselage nearly finished

I've nearly got the fuselage finished at last. Here's what it looks like with the engine fairings.

As I mentioned in the last post, the fairings were one of the most fiddly jobs of this project. If I'd had the option of leaving them off (as I could have done if I'd been making an SE5A), I would have done. As it was, I decided that the only way to do them was to carve them from solid and then hollow out the ends a bit to make a better join with the cylinder heads. I used 2x4mm plastic strip, and did as much shaping as possible before separating each piece from its length of strip. Once I'd got them roughly into shape, they looked like this:

The next thing to do was to glue them in place and then do some final shaping and finishing. I did the first one, as you can see in the previous post, but then realised that I should have prepainted the inner surface. I knew from experience that there would be no way of getting a clean line between the colours later, and there's not much point doing the fairings and cylinders as separate pieces if you can't get a clearly demarcated line between the colours. So I followed my normal practice of leaving it for a day or two and then ripping it off and trying again. In the event, after I had brushed a bit of liquid poly onto the join it came off very easily.

So I prepainted the inner surfaces. This forced me to make a decision on colour scheme; so Battleship Grey it is, for the cowling and ply panels. This was quite a widely used scheme, so I can decide later which example it's going to be. I left the fairings overnight to dry and then glued them into place. The forward fairings still projected a bit beyond the front of the cowling, but after leaving them another night, it was quite simple to do some final shaping with 400 wet and dry, before finishing with 600.

There were a couple of other bits of detail to do. The starboard side of the rear fuselage, like most Sopwiths, had a rectangular pattern of stitching, and I reproduced this in stretched sprue, brushed over with liquid poly to break it down a bit. You may just be able to see the stitching in the photo below:

The port side had an access panel (photos from the Cosford restoration project suggest that this was aluminium). I cut this from an extremely thin sheet of plastic card, but it was still too thick, so needed sanding down a bit in situ, with the result seen below:

Studying Windsock 54, I noticed that there seems to be a raised seam between the upper and lower panels below the cockpit, so I added these with more stretched sprue. Raised panel lines! I tell you, they're the way to go.

But on second thoughts, I think the seams should extend further back, so I might have to scrape them down and redo them. And I've still got to do the radiator shutter assembly. Tomorrow maybe.