Monday, August 20, 2018

AT-99 Scorpion part 3

The torment continues. Moving on, I was up to tackling the missiles and their racks.  Once again I had to dig the missiles and racks out of a lot of flash - 

 I cleaned two of them, and noticed that, once again, the mold had slipped or something - the missiles had this wide seam down the side and was also twice as wide as it should have been.  Ok, I'll have to make my own. I cut the tip off one of the missiles and took my trusty 1.2mm rod to make up the length of the missile. With the vanes were equally wonky, I took some flat styrene stock and cut out a rectangle. gluing it to the rod, it became quickly apparent this wasn't going to work. I had 8 missiles to do.   Nope I was going to buy some aftermarket missiles. 
Heading to eBay I quickly found quite a few missile sets. The one I chose was this one - 
 I noticed that while I needed 8 missiles - on the model they were all the same type - none of the aftermarket ones had 8 missiles. This meant that I would have to buy two boxes of them. Am I out of my mind?! I'm not paying an extra $10 for 2 missiles from the second box. So this AT-99 will have 4 of one kind and 4 of another.  There was no way to pay for shipping (it was free) to get them here faster, so I'll have to wait for the 1st week of Sept. - when they arrive - to continue the missile part.

Then I actually caught a break. I was watching the Sunday marathon of military aircraft on the Smithsonian Channel. One show was the story of the Apache helicopter. Then it hit me where the design for the Scorpion came from. It was so obvious, I don't know why I didn't see it right away. It also solved 2 problems I had. On the kit there was these 3 protuberances. I couldn't tell what they were as each of them had a big bubble hole on the side. The instruction images were also useless (more on that later).  But seeing the show helped immensely. They ended up being two transmission gear boxes, and a light - 

Once again I cut the nubs off and for the gearboxes I found a styrene tubes of similar diameter, glued them on and then shaped it as close as I could get it to whats in the picture.  For the light I took a .5mm (?) clear rod and matched it to the size of the nub. I left a little of the nub to act as a seat for the light.  How could I make it a light? what I did was take out a micro drill bit and drilled out a hole as close to center as I could. Inside it looked a little rough, so having just Futured my canopy, I dipped the light into Future and it got rid of all the drill marks. :)   Images showed both a red light and a yellow light.  I took some Vallejo transparent red and a tiny brush and put some red into the hole. I'll install this after the painting and weathering is complete.

Enough for one day. More soon. Thanks for looking. 
 

No comments: