Christmas Airfix!

Which part of the cockpit?

The canopy. I frosted it.

Ah. You’d have a job on scratch building a replacement for that 🙁

You could genuinely mistake that blackbird for the real thing, except that it needs massive chicken strips.

What do you use for the metal effect on the exhaust?

Ffs northwind, I’ve just looked back through the whole thread, looking for pics of an ace looking SR-71…

The exhaust came like that – built very much out of the box

The wonderful people at Airfix have sold me a new canopy for £3 including delivery. I shall endeavour not to destroy this one with chemicals.

Also, I take back what I said earlier about the kit, but if you are building the undercarriage I would ignore the instructions and try different methods of assembly before committing yourself to glue and finding that A) It won’t fit inside the nacelle without a bit of trimming, and B) If you are going to follow the instructions to the letter you need to grow an extra hand.

Some tremendous looking aircraft there nairnster! Very impressive!

And liking the the Honda JD! 😉

I’ll have to do some more photos. There’s a Honda CB750 (Superdream shape), ’67 Ford Mustang and numerous others that I haven’t got round to photographing yet.

BTW I am never ever doing another sailing ship. Fr**ging in the rigging indeed 👿

I have an SR71 on the go didn’t take many pictures as I went though.

It’s the Italeri 1/72

Needed loads of filling and sanding on the fuselage joins

Its languishing in need of the rest of the decals and then some weathering

No pictures, but my lightening is coming along. Getting the front fuselage with the air intakes and cockpit assembled was a right bastard, but it’s done now.

Anyway, painting. Any tips for getting the best brush finish I can on large flat parts like wings? I’m not going the airbrush route. Obviously normal rules of painting apply, thin coats and strokes in the same direction. What about a very light sand before the final coat? Anything else?

Make sure you wash all the parts/sprue in soapy water before building the model. This definitely helps with paint adhesion I have found.

I brush paint all of mine, good quality brush makes a huge difference. I don’t do any sanding specifically for paint prep. Brush strokes in direction of airflow, lighter colours first etc. It takes practice and you will get better with each model.

Tamiya 1:12 Honda CB750F:

Nice^

I’ve just spent the last hour messing about with the weathering on a Mosquito. Will post up a picture when it is done.

Indeed, that’s brough back a load of memories @john_drummer. I had the same kit (cos I had the bike) and never quite got round to doing it. The bike decided that it didn’t like oil in the 3rd lane of the M40. We spent rather a long time stood right by a Cadbury’s World sign waiting to be rescued. Mssed a wedding in the process…

I tend to do cars & motorcycles in showroom condition straight OOB. AFVs do get some weathering and ideally some crew, possibly even a diorama. I have a nice WWII France street scene involving a Churchill MkVII, some Tommies and a local farmer with a bottle of wine in 1:35

Grubby Mosquito.

Went a bit OTT with the filth. I’ll have to tone it down on the next one.

Nice spinners 🙂

Thanks. The cockpit was a little nerve wracking at the second attempt too.

I’m doing a BF109E, Spitfire MKII and finishing the Stuka for my lad’s Battle of Britain ceiling thing, then I’m doing an EE Lightning. I need to sort out my weathering technique for that as general smears of crap won’t look great and i’m wary of using silver paint, as experiences with it so far haven’t given good results. .

I put dirt around the fuel fillers on the Mosquito. I was quite pleased with that in a sad sort of way.

For the Lightning I’d use Tamiya XF16 Flat Aluminium. It’s an acrylic so thinned / cleaned with water if necessary, and quite thin so use a big brush and load it up well

I’ve been having a few problems with the Lightning. The cockpit doesn’t fit properly, had to do a load of trimming to get the fuselage halves to meet at the front. The top of the seat now sits a bit high so the canopy won’t fit correctly. I’m going to have to try and get it out to do some more adjustment. 🙁

Any views on Tamiya aircraft kits?

I have my eye on one of these.

http://www.jadlamracingmodels.com/tamiya-60720-tornado-f3-1-72-aircraft-model-kit/

I’ve got a pile under my drawing board that need to built at some point…

Westwings Skylark – Semi Scale RC half built
1:32 Revell Phantom that is just Massive!
1:24 Airfix 109 – Got all the Eduard bits for this too, So far I’ve got as far as making the engine almost scale and cutting out the fuselage to have an open panel – On the field sort of look.

RE: Tamiya – The Tamiya 1:48 is a classic I’ve built a couple, they are a far better than Airfix which are a little shit really if you take off the rose tinted glasses.

The Tamiya Tornado F.3 is the Italeri mould, not up to the full Japanese standards but ok.

The Tamiya 1:48 Sea Harrier is most definitely not up to their usual standards. I’m sure it’s an Airfix imposter

Just taken a punt on one of these because:

1) As a child of the 80’s I have a thing for Soviet planes.

2) It was 13 quid.

This is getting a bit silly now. I’ve got three on the go with a completion rate of one a week and a backlog of about ten.

Somehow I have ended up with a landing craft.

I will never build this.

Ever.

Gah. Another “melting” incident. Using a big lump of filler as nose wheel ballast has turned the radar dome on the Lightning into something that resembles a jalapeno. When/if it dries I’ll try and rescue it. If I can’t it is a £7.95 lesson on my model building learning curve. No point in trying to buy the three spare parts as they will cost more than the kit itself.

This has however made me find that self-adhesive lead weights are available. And it was best to destroy the Lightning rather than the more expensive Mig-29 and Su-27 that are next on the production line.

How do you “brush painters” do the darker areas round control surfaces and panel lines?

Have a look here: http://www.britmodeller.com/forums/

How do you “brush painters” do the darker areas round control surfaces and panel lines?

Underpaint black then bring it to light.

(Games workshop style)

I use this almost on everything apart from large surface/panel and unless I’m painting flesh in which case I underpaint white and then send the shadows to dark using artist inks.

(Apologies if thats teaching you to suck eggs)

Nah. All tips welcome! I’m coming back to this after a 30 year break.

juanghia – Member

Underpaint black then bring it to light.

(Games workshop style)

Nothing gets brought to light games workshop style, it’s ENDLESS DARKNESS

Meh. The Lightning is ruined. Shit.

Can’t you make it look like it’s been shot up at the front, and is going down in flames from your lad’s ceiling? 😀

It’s a shame, as I was waiting to see if you had the same cockpit problems that I did, or if I’m just as lame at building these things now as I was years ago.

I did do a test to see if it went together before I ordered a replacement. It did. 😀

I’ll finish the Lightning and let my lad have a go at building up the other one with the warped radar dome and fairing. I’ll pinch the pilot though for my Su-27.

Went a bit OTT with the filth. I’ll have to tone it down on the next one.

Lots of practice dry-brushing various combinations of paint and inks appropriately thinned and layered, and keep it subtle! It has to replicate the way it actually happens on the aircraft while in service; the plane starts off all clean and shiny, but flying causes oil, exhaust gasses, dirt and dust from the air itself to build up in very thin, faint layers, accumulating over many hours of combat flying, so instead of trying to dry-brush fairly dark paint in a thin layer, you have to gradually build up very thin layers of very thinned dark ink or paint, just kind of ‘sneaking up’ on it, gradually adding more layers where the staining is naturally going to be darker, inline with the stub exhausts, behind the gun ports and shell ejection ports, etc, and building up very thin layers of thinned silver along all the leading edges of flying surfaces, prop blades, etc.
Loading the brush, then wiping a fair bit off on scrap card, or paper* by brushing like you’ll be doing on the model, then brushing on the model!
It’s a time-consuming process, but it pays off if you don’t rush it; many hours modding and painting AD&D figures teaches you that, they’re a lot smaller than an average plastic kit!
*Old phone directories are very handy things to use for this, you can mix paint in small amounts on a page, wipe the brush to get the dry-brushing just right, then rip the page off and bin it after each session.
I’ve still got one of the really thick ones, with the heavy board covers, from when I used to paint AD&D figures and pin-stripe/sign-write friends cars and bike helmets, very handy thing to have. 😀

Coming at this from a the model railway world, (not airfix i’m affraid but i guess its all the same) i really would recommend humbrol weathering powders. its early days at the the moment and still experimenting but i’m liking them. I mix these up with water and apply as a generous wash over the pristine paintwork. then when dry i wash off the excess with either a tissue or a cotton bud. You can also apply them neat as a dust to the model and move them about. Again excesses can be washed off. Then when happy set them with a spray coat of varnish. The results so far have been rather pleasing. furthermore over the course of a couple of days they seem to tone down and have a very subtle effect.

There are some humbrol channel videos on youtube that i would recommend. As ever they make it look very easy but do give you some ideas to practice with. I knocked up a painted panel of plastic and practiced on this before i attacked the real thing.

I use flory dark dirt wash.

Revell Stuka.

Was a little more restrained on the weathering, just adding exhaust muck and something behind the guns.

I’ve been having a few problems with the Lightning. The cockpit doesn’t fit properly, had to do a load of trimming to get the fuselage halves to meet at the front.

Just spent 2 hours trimming it down. What a bastard! There are 4 raised lumps from where the fuselage halves were ejected from the mould that prevent it going together. I had to sand down the sides of the air intakes too and it still needed some filler. The fairing over the instrument panel didn’t fit either. Got there in the end but whoever was responsible for the QC on that wants beating with a stick.

I’ve got another one to build too! Shit! I managed to rebuild the bit that I melted with filler by comparing it with the part from the replacement kit. It looks OK and only I’ll know that it is a bodge.

Getting 4g of weight in the nose was a PITA too. I’ve got some lead wheel balance weights, but had to hack saw them up to get them to fit in. Can’t say I’m having much fun with this one.

his popped up on my FB feed, I think the attention to detail is incredible.