Did I say I won't start this earlier than in a half a year? Forget it.
Everything else I'm working on either waits on some etch or paint to come in the mail, or requires painting (and I don't feel like painting anything this weekend), or requires too much setup and preparation to start in the evening after work.
So, I pulled this little guy from the stash. The manual seemed pretty straightforward, there's no painting to be done until at least 6th or 7th page of the manual, and it seemed like fun.
Initial impressions:
Plastic quality: easy to work with, scrapes and files easily to a nice finish, a bit brittle which resulted in three breakages already. But nothing that can't be fixed with a bit of glue.
Fit: just perfect. Very positive confirmation that the part is in its place, joining lines almost disappear, everything so far fits.
Overall impression: complete, utter insanity of a kit. I'm gluing together parts so small, no photo etch I've used came even close. The amount of microscopic detail, number of parts building up to things that in other kits would be one part, the precision needed to remove parts from sprues just insane.
After 4 hours of work I just got through the first page of manual. This was 47 parts building up into something the size of a zippo lighter.
I enjoyed immensely every moment of it. This might be my favourite plastic kit of this year.
I'll start a build diary and post some pictures tomorrow.
Any images I post on my personal builds are free to be used and shared under Creative Commons Attribution license, which means you can do what you want with them, on the condition you mention I'm the author.
Happy building :-)
http://www.model-space.com/gb/