[Whiterook]

Man, I’ve been working on this Gotha Night Raider Bomber forever! Well, it feels like forever, anyway. This is officially the longest I’ve ever worked on any one model. It’s been an interesting build for me on so many levels…the new ground traversed has been staggering (truly), in that I had to step WAY out of my comfort zone, which is a good thing to do on a regular basis! I think I would have been better served in some respects, had I chosen a less difficult subject, but no regrets here…I wanted a challenge, I recognized the challenge, and I seized the opportunity to stretch my creative limits…and that it has. Am I happy with the way it’s turning out? If I’m brutally honest…at the moment, not really; but I have hopes that this will change. I don’t consider myself a perfectionist, but I typically set a very high creative bar for myself. The learning curve has just been so great on this piece that, on mistakes made and corrected, tested my patience to the point that I bitched and swore at this damned bird more than once, with the worst display of such emotions this weekend:

Rigging…my word that can be hell on earth lads! What a pain in the sphincter posterius major! Saturday, I was at my wits end. I was a hairs breath away from scrapping the build and hiding it in its box for another day far, far away. Seriously! The mass of curled tippet fishing line anchored to the top wing was a tangled heap of confusion and source of despair. “Why was I doing this to myself?” I asked; with the answer of, “Because you’re a friggin’ moron, you moron!”…and alas, staring at my albatross sitting defiantly upon my work bench, I could not dispute the answer. My major obstacle up to this juncture has been that I never worked with super glue, so I was trying all manner of alternatives, to no avail. In the end, there was no other solution but to use super glue…the problem being however, that I could not find accelerator anywhere, which made the process without it extremely time consuming in achieving proper curing time to achieve acceptable bonds. I had previously threaded most of the left wing and tied off the lines, but getting glue into the holes fought against the taut lines; and then the final insult was a major line popping sarcastically out of its anchor on the top wing. I went upstairs to watch the Olympics, in utter disgust.

That’s when the breakthrough came. Sunday afternoon. Three hours that turned the build on a dime for me. I went down for one last go, as I just couldn’t bear the thought of defeat. My original method of drawing the line through the bottom wing, and suspending hemostats to weigh the lines taut failed miserably; I know it can be done, but I know now that you really need to jig the piece to achieve this successfully. Also, using a pin head to deliver glue to the holes proved unwieldy and gummed-up the head of the pin quickly. And I was using way too much glue, causing long cure times. The difference came when I began to use a much lighter touch with holding the tippet lines with my fingers (rather than using hemostats and tweezers) and delivering the super glue with wire (.30, I believe) that I had bought in the craft store…success! As the wire gummed-up, I would simply snip it off and keep on moving. I fished out and threaded more tippet line through the bottom wing, one at a time, flipping the bird upside down to deliver the glue…cell by cell. The anchors held, and I applied a bit of super glue to these anchor points as I went, to shore up the strength of these critical points. As I went, the confusion of line reduced, and I even managed to repair the popped wire from the night before (with maddening difficulty). The wings are totally rigged, with the exception of two long wires that have to wait for a few bits to be installed first; and I have tail wires to put on, but I need to attach some small bits and apply some decals first. I also need to trim tippet line ends from under the wing, which will be extremely difficult as the whole exterior is covered with decals, so shaving them off with a hobby knife is out of the question.

I still have a ways to go, with landing gear to be attached, bombs, machine guns, and other small bits. And I need to do some touch up painting to where the decals had “flaked” a tad at some section joins and edges. She’s almost airworthy!