Yesterday I drilled and tapped all the holes in the frame ribbing and then this morning I assembled the lower hull frame itself.....went together like a dream!
Then this evening I fitted the ribs to the engine deck and started tinkering around with kitbashing
It's taken me several days of wracking my basic mathematics skills to work out how to accurately build the landing gear blocks, but I'm super happy with how well they're turning out.
It's not the crispiest work in the world, but it does the job.
Ironically, I find working with styrene to be very tedious, even though the results are often lovely; so I've started building the details which the plating sits around
I spent this evening adding armour panelling and more kitbashed parts, comparatively it's not as accurate as the dorsal hull, but all I'm trying to do is capture the essential gestures of the shapes on the belly, as inevitably it'll be seen less
The semovente gun halves at the bottom here aren't glued down, but I'm toying with the idea of using them instead of making angular boxes that would be more accurate
Work is insane at the moment so I've only made slight progress, but this evening I finished up this engine block on the aft underside hull.
I'll cut the styrene plating next and try to finish this whole section before moving onto the other landing gear boxes