Sarissa precision Horsa glider

Unfortunately, having a 3 three year old in the house, and having to work from home (I'm a teacher) isn't giving me quite the time that other people seem to have to work on their hobby during the coronavirus lockdown, but actually, I'm OK with that. If I was doing it all day every day I would burn out! That said, I do have a few updates that I should have been putting on here, so now is a good time to do so.

My first one is putting together a horsa glider for a British airborne force for Bolt Action, or maybe Chain of Command if I ever get around to buying the rulebook...

The glider itself is the 1/56 MDF and card kit from Sarissa Precision. I approached this with no small level of trepidation, as I find MDF kits need quite a bit of working to get them looking good, and this was by far the most complicated laser-cut kit that I have tackled.
And indeed, it was tricky, but not overly so. I have been using Roket card glue to put it together rather than PVA, and I think this has been a lifesaver. If I had had to brace things while waiting for PVA I may have lost it and just binned the damn thing altogether.

First you assemble to cockpit, and then the main fuselage of the glider begins with putting support rings around a central floor.

I made a couple of slight mistakes, both made by not paying attention to the precise order of the instructions. My advice for this kit is to do things in exactly the order you are instructed to! I have to chop a piece off the central support for the cockpit, and prise apart the second from top fuselage ring in the picture above as the lugs didn't line up. Thankfully neither of these issues were sufficient to screw the build up entirely.

The door was another tricky moment, and required pulling apart. Due to the way the hinges work, you need to assemble it attached to the fuselage. Again though, not the end of the world.
My biggest bugbear with the kit, however, is the score marks in the skin. It's an impressive piece of design work, but I definitely did not want those lines across the finished model. So, I did a little research and took an idea from the chap over at wargamesandrailroads (whose Horsa build can be found here) and covered the bugger in diall pre-mixed filler.

I applied it as smoothly as I could with my finger, and then sanded it down with some fine grit sandpaper... and it's not come out too bad. Fairly smooth, and I think I applied it thick enough that I didn't end up sanding the card itself.  I've chucked on some Galeria black acrylic paint as that filler would have just soaked up spray primer;

and I think she's looking fairly sexy. There was a huge gap between the wings and the fuselage, so I've filled that in too, but at the expense of being able to fully disassemble the model. This is going to be a sod to store now, but a good looking model > storeability in my opinion.

I still need to detail the interior of the ramp a little, and maybe make some extensions so the ramp comes down the floor, but other than that I think she's ready to take some paint! This has gone on the backburner for the moment, though, as I need to get some masking tape, and bottles of the right colours, so in the meantime I have been painting up the finishing models for my British force, and the non-rank and file elements of the Germans.
My next post will be showing off the brits, and I'll wait until I have something more interesting than rank and file for the Germans before I post them up.
I also have plans in the works for a dark ages pallisade and Strathclyde Welsh warband for Saga, so plenty to keep me occupied while the world is going to hell!