Joachim P.
Wow, this is an amazing range of airwing! I can understand now, that the original island and the Revell PE parts are somehow demanding to combine. I will follow, very interested!

Steven Van Dyck Author
Today, the L'arsenal Tamiya Enterprise hangar reduced to 1/400 arrived at my pickup point. PE parts were not developed yet, and these would also not be resized. That's a worry for later. I compared the parts to my kit. It's a bit oversized in the overall dimensions, so I will cut the floor parts down to make them fit on the hangar doors. At the front and back end of the model there is a bad lateral fit, the Tamiya model must really be designed differently there. There is some warping in the floor, it will be corrected by applying heat. The hangar doors are a perfect fit. One ammo pack is also added. The decals shown are from Revell, these I ordered from their customer service.

Joachim P.
Just in time for the weekend. Have the best of fun!!!

Steven Van Dyck Author
I still can't begin, because of those PE parts. I did add 20 Green Stuff LED's to the project inventory. These should improve visibility in the hangar.

Joachim P.
With Revell telling the Platinum Edition a Level 5 kit, all tasks you name make it Level Masterclass by all means. Hats off, Steven!

Steven Van Dyck Author
I added that kit because I now have the PE set and the decals, but I don't have the sprues. I hope I won't have to saw every part to fit.

Villiers de Vos
Booking my seat.

Steven Van Dyck Author
All are welcome, Villiers. Today the wharf is really coming in action. I added some missing bow detailing with Evergreen strips, copied from a plan in a popular book. I had to do a lot of sanding, using a diamond file and buckets of CA to fill in the sinkmarks. Some hatches and ladders were not in the Revell PE set, so I used what was left from some WW2 projects. The hangar doors ware all cast closed, so I had to use a circle cutter to open up the circular edges. It doesn't cut through 2 mm of plastic, but some tracing with a cutter and tapping with a hammer can tear it loose. The damage of that is then simply repaired. The L'Arsénal hangar parts are now prepared for assembly. The walls are thin but sadly you can't break them from the block without fragmentation. So I'll have to saw all of these. I was told while ordering the PE would not be rescaled to 1/400, so I am now relieved to see that it does fit exactly in the resin parts. These parts are badly numbered in some instances, but it can be resolved.

Hans-Jürgen Haag
👀👍🥰

Łukasz Gliński
Wow, looks like a bigly yuge and equally ambitious project 👍

Steven Van Dyck Author
Thanks, guys. Today an update about the resin parts for the hangar. These are a terrible chore to saw through, easy to break where they shouldn't and some areas are not carefully measured out like the extremity of the hangar. I had to break the rear plate to make the interior fit. Now, the large parts will follow, all having two sides to saw. It might take another week of dayly a few hours of continuous sawing. Then, most parts will have to be flattened against a hot cooking pan.

Villiers de Vos
A brave man indeed. Following with interest.

Yngve N
You build some insane things with good eye for every detail, so I will join this one too

Steven Van Dyck Author
Thanks for the recognition. The next update shows the insanity wit lots of large resin parts that need to be sawn, heated, flattened and trimmed to the hull dimensions. It appears that the large floor slabs are not at all resized to 1/400, I compared them to the original 1/350 sale pictures on the net and they are identical in length. I kept most of the pieces at the original length to not disturb the tie-down pattern. The last slab was sawn in half to fit. I made sprue supports in the hull to secure the floor. Some instructions are really strange, like the sidewall part 35 that already had all detail parts they make you assemble.

Steven Van Dyck Author
The oversize hangar parts are completed and dry-fit to determine what parts I will remove. The sliding door has to go in the rails and those Tetris blocks take too much space. I hope the height of the walls can be contained under the deck without trimming. I started on the airwing too, so part can go under the deck. Each type has its quirks, like fragile landing equipment or print errors. The Vikings have print supports that run close to the fuselage and look like part of the plane, but this is not in the airwing book. Each type has a plethora of weapons and hardpoints.

Steven Van Dyck Author
About 62 planes have been prepared for painting now. Only the Otakis remain. I had to discard the cast L'Arsénal Hawkeyes, these seem like entirely different planes compared to the printed ones and are even worse than the Otaki's. The Sea Kings are nice but extremely fragile to liberate. The vehicles were a piece of cake compared to that. The weapon set I got with the hangar seems overscale compared to the ones I got with the planes.

Steven Van Dyck Author
Today a comparison of the L'Arsénal Hawkeye, Intruder, Prowler, Corsair II and Sea King 1/400 printed rsin kits with the original Otaki 6th Fleet set. Some of them like the A6 and A7 planes can be combined quite well with ony some panelline differences. Others like the Otaki Hawkeyes and Sea Kings need some work. Strangely the dimensions of the Otaki Hawkeye match well with the data found in the sources, but the outline doesn't match on Wilipedia, while it works well for the resinkit. The choppers need to be heavily worked out to match the resin ones. The hangar weapon set was also cleaned up.