New project: F-84e Thunderjet

With the Hornethopter wrapped up, it was time to move along to the next project. I bought this kit a year or so ago for a few different reasons. First, the kit looked well made and came with a number of things that you usually have to pay extra for and order separately, such as metal landing gear. It also was 1:32 scale, which is on the larger side for aircraft, allowing for more detail and a little room to work. I had bought this with the intention of learning more about natural metal finishing, since that wasn't something I had done much of previously. Finally, I haven't made a plastic aircraft model since I was maybe 13 years old, so it seemed like it would be a fun change of pace.

This one is made by HobbyBoss and is of the Korean-war-era F-84E Thunderjet.



Since I don't seem to be able to leave well enough alone, I also ordered the 'Big Ed' kit of detailing parts from Eduard. It consists of four sets of photo-etched metal (seat belts, cockpit details, exterior details, and remove-before-flight tags) and one set of pre-cut canopy masks. Below you can see, from left to right, the canopy masks, exterior detail kit and remove-before-flight tags.



Below you can see the two frets of photo-etch for the cockpit details (left two) and one (partially used at this point) fret for the seat belt and ejector seat upgrades.



While I was ordering things, I expanded my collection of Alclad metallic paints by ordering a few more. These were chosen to provide a few similar shades of aluminum for the main aircraft skin as well as a few other colors that I thought would be handy (gunmetal, jet exhaust)



With the addition of all of the upgrade parts, I found that I needed to be much more careful of the order in which things are assembled. In addition, there was quite a bit of work that had to be done to the plastic parts, in order to shave off raised details that were to be replaced by photo-etched parts. To start, though, I put together the seat belts, since they were not replacing any kit part, making them safe to build without worry. The parts are pre-printed photo-etched metal, which is pretty cool, but also a little shinier than I would prefer and a bit tricky to bend without the paint flaking off. Here are the belts after being assembled but before bending them into final shape on the seat.



Here is a close-up of the little foot-rest-looking things for the seat in bent and unbent form. They are on a Hold-and-Fold bender (very handy!).



Here is the seat, pretty much all assembled with kit and upgrade parts mixing. Although, as I discovered later on, the upgrade parts seem to actually be for the F-84G seat rather than the F-84E (at least so I have read, as I wouldn't know for sure myself, and have had a hard time finding good reference). What this meant, though, was that the seat, with the new frame behind it, sat quite a bit further forward in the cockpit that the kit seat. This required a little bit of trimming and planning in order to get everything to fit again. Mostly just taking a bit out of the center pillar and moving the control stick forward. Also, I made a few modifications to the kit part that helps align the seat in the cockpit, so that it would fit in there securely.



Here is the seat with paint. I also had a hard time finding good reference of this cockpit as far as color goes. Most of the reference is of the F-84G, and most of THAT is of planes that have long since been decommissioned, been repainted, and have been sitting in museums for a while. Even checking other models that have been built, the colored ranged from all black, to all green to a mixture of both. Since my seat was already a bit mismatched version-wise, I decided to just go with a mixture of black and interior green. If I was a stickler for historical detail, I'd probably rebuild the seat to remove the back structure. But I'm not a stickler like that, and I like the way it looks, so I suppose this one will never win any IPMS awards ;)



Next up was to start putting together the cockpit tub. This is where is started to get a bit trickier, as there were many kit parts that were being replaced by the upgrade parts and many kit parts that just needed altering. The kit parts had many of the controls molded into the plastic, but since those were being replaced by more pre-printed etched parts, I had to shave off much of the raised details. There were also a few boxes and cylinders that either needed to be cut off and replaced with folded etch or needed to be cut off and saved to be put back on top of the printed etch parts later.

Directly connected to the front of the cockpit tub is the gun bay, with four machine cannons. Looking at the kit parts, the gun barrels were not looking so good. They were a little soft around the edges, didn't have a hole in the end, and had a mold seam that I would have to clean up. I had seen various articles in Fine Scale Modeler magazine where people used fancy turned brass gun barrels that looked just fabulous. Not having anything like that, I instead dug into a bag of scrap metal bits that I got at the local Ace Hardware, and found some lengths of 1/16" brass tubing that I could cut down and use instead. With a bit of careful cutting (I put the tube on the desk, put a sharp x-acto on top and slowly rolled back and forth, letting the knife cut through the soft metal with only light pressure), I ended up with four 1" long gun barrels that looked much better than the kit versions.



Below you can see the various cockpit and gun bay parts attached to scrap plastic and ready for painting.



Below is the current state of the cockpit and gun bay. The gun bay parts are not glued yet, but just put in there to demonstrate how they go together. Also, only a few bits of the pre-printed etch have gone into the cockpit so far, and they will get touched up a bit later and possibly sprayed with a matte medium overcoat in order to dull them down a bit (pending a paint interaction test, to avoid any possible mishaps).

The painting was made up of a base coat of Mr Surfacer 1200, then a layer of Tamiya Dark Green (XF-61) followed by an overcoat of Tamiya Cockpit Green (XF-71), all sprayed with my Paasche Talon airbrush. On the lighter green, I avoided the corners a bit, to let them stay a bit darker. The gun bay parts are Alclad Gunmetal and Dull Aluminum. Everything got a light wash of Abteilung Dark Mud in order to pick out some details and make it all a bit less clean. It still needs some selective dry-brushing of highlights, and much more of the photo-etched details, but that's for next time!



Thanks for reading!

Hornethopter Completion

Painting continued on the Hornethopter. Once the exterior surfaces were generally complete, I moved on to the cockpit. I aimed to have a red velvet seat, wood panelling and misc metal and gray control surfaces. After I got most of it painted, I found that the red paint that I used had a bit more of a sheen than I had expected, and instead of a flat velvet-like red, it was more of a red leather. But, since I wasn't too married to the idea of red velvet and I actually like the way the red leather looked, I decided to just stick with that and leave it as-is.



At this point I was ready to start general assembly. Below you can see the two major structure parts joined together.



The catch was that I couldn't really do much more assembly until I could get the model up off of the ground, since the legs hang down and were likely to just get broken or scratched up if I attached them too early. With that in mind, I headed over to a local hardwood store and picked up a block of wood that was intended for turning on a latch. This meant that it came in large blocks, and was dipped in wax (presumably to keep it an even moisture level). I found a fairly small and inexpensive chunk that had a nice burl look to it and brought it home. It required cutting down a bit in order to get a proper sized piece as well as some quality time with a blow torch in order to melt off the bulk of the wax coating. So, with a hand saw/mitre box combo and lots of elbow grease, I ended up with the piece you see below.



As you can see, the flat surfaces are a bit plain, and I wanted something that went with the steampunk theme a little better. I opted for a more organic hand-carved look for the block. This meant that I had to spend a bit of time going over the whole thing, breaking up the smooth surfaces and making it all look a bit more rustic.



After that, the block spent some quality time with gloss polyurethane and a brush, getting it all nice and shiny. I painted the name plate black and then gave it a light sanding to bring the raised text out. It then got a few coats of spray clear and was mounted to the flat front of the block. Finally, I ran some 1/8" brass tubing through a tube bender to get it curved nicely and attached that to the block as well.



Below you can see the frame of the Hornethopter mounted to the base.



With that done, construction could precede, with the other parts being mounted and the wings finally being started on. I realized that it probably would have been a bit better to figure out the wing mounting techniques a bit earlier, before painting, since it was going to be tricky to not damage the paint now. I settled on a little trick that worked pretty well: I drilled holes into the wing sockets on the body of the model, and the set brass rod in there that was the exact depth of the hole. I put a tiny dab of super glue on the end of the rod and then pressed the wing base into the socket at the angle that I wanted it to stay at. This caused the bit of rod to stick to the wing in the exact spot and at the exact angle that I needed. I then gently removed both and drew a bunch of reference lines in pencil on the wing base. Then I could remove the brass rod and drill a hole at just the right angle to make it all fit back together perfectly (except stronger).

Below you can see the wing bases with their brass rods glued it, and with the reference marks still in place.



The wing frames after their coats of black gloss paint and a few coats of the same chrome paint that the rest of the body got.



Using the wing template available from the manufacturer's web site, I designed some wing film inserts that had the same general color scheme as the rest of the model. These were printed out on ink-jet-friendly transparency film and glued in between the layers of photo-etch wing. Here you can see them before the excess was trimmed off.



Finally, the wings were attached, any paint chips were touched up, and a little bit of grease/oil/rust was added here and there.

Click HERE or on the image below to see the galley of the completed model.

Hornethopter Painting

Hi there! Just a quick post today to show a bit of progress on the painting of the Hornethopter. In the last post, I showed my inspiration sheet, with the heat-treated titanium images on it. Also shown were the various parts that had been sprayed with the chrome paint. This post aims to show a few of the steps in going from chrome to heat-treated.

I switched the airbrush to the super-fine tip and needle and loaded it up with just a tiny bit of diluted Tamiya clear yellow. With the pressure set to about 15-20lbs, I freehanded some soft bands of yellow across the abdomen sections. Once I had bands of yellow on all the parts, I followed up with similarly-diluted clear red. Soft bands of clear red gave me something like so:



Below you can see the yellow and red in place and the part masked before applying the clear blue.



And the abdomen masked and painted with the first pass of blue:



Thorax fully sprayed with all three colors:



The abdomen was tricky, because it had to be painted in three steps. This was required in order to give each section plenty of space to blend the blue in, but still get a clean line against the section below. Below you can see the abdomen with all three colors applied.



Next up is putting a contrasting dark steel color on the filigree-like metal strips between the sections as well as the casting plate right at the tail. That will be following by the beginning of hand painting the cockpit and picking out all the rivets with a contrasting paint. Thanks for reading!

Hornethopter Continued

I should never have claimed that the build was moving quickly and wouldn't take very long, as that pretty much ensured that it would grind to a halt almost instantly.

So, the problem that I had with this one was that I didn't have a clear idea of exactly how I was going to paint and mount it. I hit the point where I needed to start assembly and drilling/pinning parts together, but I didn't have a mental picture of how the legs should be posed. After stewing on it for a few weeks I finally just started searching the interwebs for inspiration. I really liked the ideas of having some of the parts look like heat-treated titanium. I also wanted to embrace some of the kits steam punk look while also incorporating some modern military cues and some elements from real wasps. At the same time I did't want to repeat what I had already seen online, but I wanted to draw some inspiration from good looking models that others had built.

With all that in mind, I collected images, put them all together into a 13" x 19" format and printed myself out a big ol inspiration sheet. Below is the fun-sized internet version. Please note that this is a collection of other peoples photos, so the copyrights generally belong to them, so hopefully they won't sue me or anything ;)



Also, I have recently purchased quite a few new paints (mentioned in a previous post), but didn't really have a good way to organize them. I was finding that these taller skinny bottle were just lurking about my model desk in a group, often falling over, and generally being difficult to deal with. It was hard to quickly find the color that I wanted and it was easy to bump them so they all fell over. After a bit of consideration, I decided it was time to build a new little paint shelf, better suited to my new model desk and the differently-sized bottles. On my way home from work, I swung by Home Depot, picked up a $5 sheet of 1/4" thick MDF board and got to work. I settled on a shelf that was about 4ft long and about 7.5" tall, and 4" deep. I just sketched it out quickly, marked the board and cut out a bunch of pieces. I then realized I had cut the slot in two of the upright parts in the wrong place and called it a day ;)

The next day, I cut two new parts and glued the whole thing together. Below you can see the end result, putting most of my paints and pigments within arms reach.



With some inspiration gained, and the model desk freshly organized, I began gluing things together. Below you can see the legs put together. I glued the upper and lower sections together first and then drilled through the joint with a pin vice and glued some brass rod into the hole in order to strengthen the joint. The leg pose that I decided on was one that hopefully mimics the legs of a real hornet, when in flight. The image above of the flying hornet is what I was aiming for. While I can't hit the pose exactly, since the kit legs can't fold up against the body quite that far, I'm hoping that the general feel will be similar.



With a coat of primer sprayed onto these parts, I began the rough assembly. This consisted of marking, taping and sticking (with museum tack) the various parts together, so that I could drill holes and glue in brass pins where needed. The legs, for example, were posed and then held by one hand, while the other hand used the Dremel (with the flexi-wand attachment thing), fitted with a tiny drill bit, to drill through the ball joint into the body. Then, I could fit an appropriately-sized length of brass rod through this hole. I glued the rod just to the leg, making it so I could take the whole thing apart, but once painting is done, it can be easily reassembled just as intended. Below you can see the first three legs pinned in place.



Once I had all the pins installed in the legs, I prepped all of the sprayable parts for painting by attaching various handles to them.



As I alluded to earlier, I decided to go with a metal finish for most of the model. I decided to use Alclad lacquer on this model, which is not something I have tried before. For the finishes I am using, it is a two step process. First, a gloss black paint is sprayed over the parts, and then, after drying for a day, the metallic paint is lightly sprayed over the black. Below you can see the legs with their gloss black coat.



The abdomen with its gloss black:



For the legs and connecting frame, I used Alclad Steel paint, which is a darker, semi-gloss finish. Below you can see the legs hanging to dry.



The rest of the parts were painted with Alclad Chrome. This is a nice bright, high-gloss paint, although a bit trickier to apply well than the steel color was. The plans is to get these parts nice and bright and then go back over them with a few colors of clear yellow, red and blue paint, hopefully getting the rainbow looks of heat treated titanium. Depending on how that turns out, I may then dull it all down a bit with some weathering and dirt, but I'll play that by ear.

Below is the thorax drying.



And the abdomen after its chrome treatment. This one ended up with a few duller areas, and may need another coat to even it out.



Below you can see the main connecting structure painted in steel, with the stinger painted chrome.



That's where I am as of this evening. Next up is a bit of repainting on the abdomen and then a shot at the multi-color clear treatment. Also, as soon as the cockpit section is done with airbrushing, I can begin hand painting the wood and seat in there as well as the pilot and control panel.

Next Up: Hornethopter

Moving right along, I've decided to try something new for my next project. While I worked with resin castings a bit during the Panzer build, I have never done a full resin model before. A little while back, my good friend, Neil Blevins, pointed me towards the Industria Mechanika web site. Industria Mechanika does both resin kit design as well as coordinating other artists and their designs. They bring the designs together with the production means and end up selling limited-run resin kits in a variety of themes. Finding their designs, and the premise of trying out a resin kit, interesting, I ordered up one of the smaller kits just as they were running the third edition of it.

That brings me to the next model:



This one is a steampunk-styled Hornet-shaped ornithopter.

As you can see below, this kit is mostly resin castings, but also has a few photo-etch sheets (which are impressively thick), a clear windshield and two glass eye lenses. It also comes with a bit of coated wire for the leg rigging, but I don't think it i visible in the image below.



Here is a close-up on the straight-from-the-box leg segments. These will require a bit of clean up, a bit of filling and things of that nature, but overall, the castings look good and have lots of detail.



Below, you can see the main parts of the wasp body and the bodies of the figures that come with the kit.



This build is moving fairly quickly, since the overall parts count is much lower than the average plastic model. I expect to complete this one within a month or so, so watch out for more updates!

Kröte - Finished and Photographed

Another one wrapped up. Below you can see the finished product. Once I went to put everything together, I found that the concave bottom of the robot feet made it quite difficult to glue down to the base. I ended up having to build some additional structure on to the feet bottoms so that there was something of substance under there that could be glued down.



Weathering was done with MIG pigments and Abteilung oils. I also went back and added a good deal of red primer-colored paint along many of the edges to represent chipped and scraped paint. It's another new technique for me (since I don't do much armor modeling) and I feel that it was somewhat successful. Next time, though, I think I'll approach it a little differently, using some of the same salt-mask techniques on the flooring and maybe looking into a similar technique that uses hairspray as a masking agent.

Next, various washes of dark oils and pigments, spread around with mineral spirits were used to accent the details. Some selective areas of dirt and rust, also spread with mineral spirits, picked out areas that I thought would likely rust a bit. Finally, a few touches of MIG Oil and Grime mixture (basically a black/brown sludge that dries glossy to look wet) were used to add some leaky areas and a few spots on the floor.



Click on any of the images, or the link on the side bar to the right, to go to the full gallery.



Thanks for reading!

Kröte - Diorama and Weathering

Part way through the build of this kit, I decided that I wanted a little bit of environmental context for the completed model. For me, that meant building an appropriate base for it to stand on, as well as a few props to give context to why the model had its side panel opened up. Since the kit also came with the figure, I thought a good solution was to make the floor something like an aircraft hanger floor, to add a table and ladder, a few dollhouse tools and accessories and a few painted parts from the spares drawer.

Starting with the floor, as I mentioned in the last post, I painted it all a metal color and gave it a few thick coats of clear to protect the metal paint. Next, I decided to try out a new technique: using salt and water to roughly mask coats of paint. This involved dampening the surface and sprinkling table salt over it. The water made the salt stick and I pushed it around a bit with my finger to get it to clump together a bit. Once allowed to dry, the salt hardens up and is ready for painting. Below, you can see my freshly salted floor.



After the salting, I applied a few coats of various shades of grey paint. Then I rubbed some of the salt off, exposing the bright metal underneath. Being that this was the first time I tried this technique, I found that I had probably used a bit much salt, making my chips very large and very numerous. So, I left some of the salt on there and then airbrushed a few light coats of more grey paint over the newly-exposed metal areas. This dulled them down a bit, and added some depth. Next I masked and sprayed a white line across the floor, just for visual interest. Finally, I rubbed off the last little bits of salt, leaving a few fresh paint chips. As an added touch, I took a fine grain sanding stick and gave the surface a very light sanding. As I had hoped, this took the grey paint off of the raised areas, but didn't get down to the metal paint, because of the thick coats of clear in between. This gave me the look of having the grey paint rubbed off of all of the raised parts of the diamond plate.



Next up was to build a few extra bits of furniture in order to help fill out the scene. I figured that a little work table would make sense, so I put one together using some strip and sheet styrene that I had around. Below you can see the completed, but unpainted, table in place as I tried to figure out where things should be situated on the base.



After the table, I noticed that the figure would be far too short to reach the open access panel of the machine without some sort of stool or ladder. So, using the same sort of strip and sheet styrene, I built a little ladder to lean against the side of the model (although I forgot to take a photo of it). This just left a bit of painting on the new parts and weathering of all parts. Below you can see part of my collection of pigments and oil paints that were used for the weathering and detailing. You can also see the couple of doll house props that I bought to go along with this (oil can, lunch box)



That's it for this entry. Up next: photos of the finished model and diorama. Thanks for reading!