WASP Arrowhead Fighter - Part 1

The World Aquanaut Security Patrol is an elite arm of the World Navy and is based at Marineville, on America's Pacific coast.  As well as a surface and underwater presence, WASP also operates a fleet of fighters and bombers.
There are the sleek fighter jets, the Arrowheads, and the atomic bombers, the powerful Spearheads.  This post is about me starting to build an Arrowhead fighter.

This is based on an Aurora F5 Freedom Fighter prototype, but my version is based on the Airfix 1/72 scale production version.  Basically, the wings are placed at the rear, the tail-planes where the intakes should be, and the intakes under the tail!  Easy ^_^

The Airfix kit is actually a bit of a mess.  The parts fit where they touch, the nose is too wide for the forward fuselage, and the rear fuselage section is misshapen.

First step is to clean the parts up and then assemble them, including the wings and tail-planes.  These were then cut off, their mating surfaces to be reshaped to follow the contours of their new locations.

Here is the plane as it stands at the moment...

The next stage is sanding all of that filler down and removing the raised panel lines.  I'll add new panel lines with a pencil.  The cockpit interior will be kept relatively simple as the pilot will conceal most of the detail in a model of this size.

The Arrowhead has diced bands on the wings, and I thought these were going to be a problem, but then I found an old Scorpion fighter which had these decals, so that was a major problem solved very easily.  Never throw old decals away!

Part 2 soon...