F-84e Progress

Hey there! It's been ages, I know, but I'm back with an update on my progress on the F-84e. Since the last update, lots of other exciting non-model-related things have happened, such as me finishing work on Monsters University (in theaters June 21st!), some vacation, and misc other tasks. But recently, I decided to quit slacking around and try to make some real progress on this model. Here's what I have been up to…

After the cockpit, the next step was the landing gear and air brake bays. The detail kit from Eduard included various panels and brackets for these, so you can see a few of those in the images below. The Eduard instructions also called for me to cut one of the corners out of one rear gear bay and replace it with an etch panel (lower right, in the below photo). This was questionably successful, as the part that I was supposed to replace the floor corner with didn't fit very well and the thickness between the plastic floor parts and the etch version just weren't close enough to blend together. I decided to just let it slide and replaced the etch floor with some polystyrene card and leave it at that.



Below you can see the same bays after priming and painting in a base green. They had various details picked out by hand in steel paint, the raised bits picked out with a lighter shade via dry brushing and the whole things hit with a grungy brown wash to give it all a bit of dirt.



Next up was prepping the fuselage halves for assembly. Since the front gear bay, air brake bay and cockpit are all locked between the halved when they go together, the inside of the fuselage halves need to be painted to match where appropriate. As you can see in the image below, most of it was painted the same green as the cockpit. The metallic bit at the front is the area that is seen through the nose intake, which, according to reference photos, matches the exterior aluminum color.



Similarly, the front landing gear bay had to have the upper section of it painted that same aluminum, since it goes in that same intake, and splits the flow of air. I'm not sure what the little black panel is, but all the reference I could find showed it being black and shiny, so there you have it.



Below you can see the fuselage halves in place, while the glue is drying, with the cockpit sandwiched in between.



Skipping ahead a bit, the next step was to assemble the wings, which sandwich the rear gear bays in them. This was another area where the Eduard detail kit had a few extras for me to add. The place where the flaps go had an extra photo-etch piece, which showed a bit of the structure of the wing itself. These were a little tricky, as it required that a little bit of the wing be cut away to make room for the flap connections (which were also replaced by etch parts). You can see in the photo below that the two sides are different colors, as I first tried filling in the gaps with super glue, on the right side, and then, not being happy with that (but also not willing to take it back apart) I took a different approach on the left side and filled the area in with green putty. The putty was then sanded back into a flat surface which fit the etch part a little better. While neither side is perfect, I'm hoping that the imperfections are mostly covered by the flaps, once they are in place.

Also visible below is a bit of the filling that was added between the fuselage halves to help cover up the seam.



Next up was to mask the canopy parts, using the precut masks that came with the Eduard kit. Generally, they fit well, but were tricky to place in a few cases. You can see below where I ended up just adding a little bit of extra tape, because it was giving me too much trouble getting the mask into just the right place. Also, this is where I ran into a bit of a snag. I discovered that, with all the cockpit stuff in place, the front canopy section wouldn't actually fit over it.

Whoops!

The HUD glass was sticking up a bit too far to allow the canopy to fit into its spot. What I ended up doing was detaching a few of the parts that held the HUD and then shortened a few of them, so that, once back in place, they were low enough to allow the canopy to fit. A side note here: I found that the clear HUD piece that came with the kit seemed strangely large. If I were to go back and do it again, I'd probably make a new piece that was quite a bit smaller and substitute that instead. But, by the time I got far enough along and realized that its scale didn't really match the reference photos I had, I really wasn't up for tearing it apart again and building something new. Oh well :)

The rear canopy section is taped in place on the front and held in the back with a tiny dab of clear-parts glue, with the thought that it'll be easy to pop back off after painting.



Below you can see the various gear bays masked off and ready for priming and painting.



The various flaps and such with the standard scrap-sprue handles, also ready for priming and painting.



The model after priming with Mr Surfacer 1200:



I made myself a little handle out of some scrap bass wood I had around and some self-adhesive cork sheeting I had left over from when I lined my desk drawers. I'm pretty sure I may have snapped off a few of the etch parts inside the exhaust, but I'll fix those later ;)



Next up was some pre-shading on the panel lines with some Tamiya German Grey. The idea here is to just give some contrasting tones that can subtly show through the metallic paint later on. This helps break up the otherwise flat surface and hints at wear and tear.



Next up was a base coat of Alcald Aluminum paint. Then various panels were masked off and painted with a darker aluminum shade. Then more panels were masked and painted with a lighter aluminum shade. Next, the top of the canopy was masked and painted flat white. Finally, the top of the fuselage was masked and painted olive drab.



In the below photo, it is a little easier to see some of the variation in the panel shades. These will be picked out a bit more later on with weathering and pin washing.



Next up were two coats of Pledge Future, to prep for decals. For those not familiar with this stuff, it is a floor care product that is widely used by modelers since it has a number of features that make it great to work with. First off, it can be airbrushed directly, without any diluting (very handy). It provides a nice glossy surface, to help prevent silvering (this is the reason to want a gloss coat at this point) with the decals and also lays nice and flat after drying, so you don't have to worry about it adding a ton of thickness or filling in fine panel seams. Also, it is an acrylic product, so I can put it right over the fragile Alclad paint and not have to worry about the solvents eating away the paint. It also smells nice :)

Since it's no longer called 'Future', I figured I'd add an image of what my bottle looks like, so that others wanting to use the same had an easier time tracking it down (it can be ordered from amazon.com).



And finally, here's a little teaser of the in-progress decal work. At this time, I've got one side pretty much complete decal-wise and am moving on to the other side.



Once the decals are all on, then it's back to the landing gear, in order to give this bird some legs to stand on. Then comes an overcoating of flat clear to kill the gloss from the Future, removal of the canopy masks and then final assembly. I'm still debating how I want to display this one, so I'll leave thoughts on that to a later post.

Thanks for reading!

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.