AT-99 Scorpion Finale

 This session I started out by cleaning up the yellow tips of the rockets, and then went crazy for a few moments and painted green stripes around the yellow. 

You'd think at this point, the model would just let me finish, but no. The rockets went on the pylons well enough, but the pylons just wouldn't go on straight. Then it gets to the point where I touched the ca, and then the part sticks to your finger with the tiny molecule of ca more than where it's supposed to go with a full coating of ca.  UGH. Eventually they did go on. 

Then I rethought the base I was considering. The copter would have been flying. It also meant that I would have to dismantle the rotor rings and replace the static rotors with circles of acetate mimicking spinning. I wasn't about to do that!!!

Finally I remembered that I only put decal film on the decals I was going to use. Coincedently, on the latest Lou Dalmasso show on You Tube, he tests decals on an extra piece of styrene to see what happens if not using Decal Film.  So I did the same thing. Nothing bad happened, so I took the extra numbers and added them to the tail, making sure I cut all the extras from around the printed parts. There was also two rescue in the arrow markers that I added near the cockpit.


So here we have it done.

Thanks for looking. 

AT-99 Scorpion part 6

Only a small update since the 1/144 Sidewinders came in from eBay. But as it turns out it's one step ahead, one step back. Putting the decals on last time, and after multiple coats of Micro Sol, it's obvious they they are not going to settle in. I guess I put too much of the decal film over the top of them. Dang it!
So I scraped the decals off and will look for generic numbers from my spare decals. 

The missiles look great, and the perfect size. As can be seen in the pics, they are from OzMods. The arrow points to one that came with the kit. You can see how distorted it is compared to OzMods'.
 

Arrow points to the one that came with the kit.

There is a very fine bit of flash between the pour stub and the missile on each one plus an attachment point mid missile that needs to be removed. The other connection point is one of the tail fins. Once the stub mid missile is cut, the other breaks away cleanly by just rolling the missile over.

Once cleaned, they were primed and then painted with V's Zinc Chromate. To add a little color I wanted to add yellow to the tips. V's yellow is pretty weak, so first I had to add white. Each one was a quick dip.

Even tho the flash was minimal,  because they are so thin, it takes time to cleanup. Leaving them to dry, they will be added next session. 
Thanks for looking.

 

AT-99 Scorpion part 5

I thought this session I would be done with the copter, and would start on the base/vignette. Nope, not to be. First thing I did was paint the gray stripe a light blue so at least you can see the guy in the cockpit - 

Then having glued the front and back of the canopy to hold it in place, I did the sides today.  Then I puttied and even painted it. But looking at the pic, it's really uneven and need to get in there with more putty. even with the bright blue stripe and a few coats of Future, the vac form canopy isn't that clear...

While I was waiting for the canopy to dry, I did a little more weathering. All of the vehicles in the movie were well looked after, so while I want them to looked used, I didn't want them all beat up.

One other point is I got out the missiles from the 1/72 set, and SOB they are gigantic compared to the missiles in the kit. All I can guess it that they used 1/144 scale missiles. From the looks of them they are sidewinders. So I found 1/144 Sidewinders on ebay.  we'll see, if they don't fit, I guess I WILL have to make my own. But I'll be mad about it.

Thanks for looking. I should really finish up next time.

AT-99 Scorpion part 4

I needed to take a break from cleaning the bad castings and started to paint the few parts that I thought was ready to go. First up was the rotor blades - 

Then moved on the to fuselage - 

The final for the day is I took one of the pilots from the 1/72 scale pilot and crew set and painted him up. The pilots had just a typical green jumpsuit. The main characters had helmets with no visors, but mine did so I just painted them a gloss black. Thanks for looking. 

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. 
 

AT-99 Scorpion part 2

Work moves slowly with this kit. So slowly that I'm just taking pics at the end of a session to record what was done. This entry is the result of 3 sessions.

In this session I cut off what was a pour plug on the tail. Becasue the kit is rough, I don't want to cut off anything that should remain.  Next was to clean the horizontal tail plane and then the two vertical stabilizers.  what I also did was to again take out the rivet maker for 1/72 and drew rivets all over.

The next day I was back and the next step was to add the forward winglets to the front of the craft. On it are two gatling guns. The flash etc... for the winglets were bad. But looking at the guns, one of them had the mold slip and left a step. Repairing the barrels were just too difficult so I cut them off and added new barrels out of 1.2mm styrene rods. 

After cleaning them up, they looked rather weak so I decided that I would add them later to the craft to avoid them being constantly knocked off.

For day 3 I turned to the large wings and also the rocket canisters. There are two different kinds. One set with a long "handle", and one with short ones. I should have 6 long ones, and 4 short. But no matter how I counted, I was one short of the long and one extra on the short. They were so badly cast, that there may have been a long one where and thought it short and cut what I thought was the pour plug ...

But first the wings seemed fairly easy to clean up. After the cleanup I decided to add the rivets. I rolled along nicely until PLOP! I fell in a hole. It was a bubble just under the surface. OK, I'll have to fix that. Then a few minutes later - PLOP again. Another hole! 
I hold the piece up to the light, and there were 3 of them. One, luckily I missed. The other two got the Aves treatment. 

Now came the canisters. Most of them were bad.

The rest of the session was taken up by cleaning these canisters.  Even more time was spent drilling the small holes at the back of the canisters. There's nothing I can do about the little nubs in the front. 
More coming soon. Thanks for looking.

Avatar's AT-99 Scorpion

These helicopters drew my attention right away while watching Avatar. There was two types, the Scorpion and the Samson.   The Scorpion is shown below. The Samson has a V shaped rear stabilizer.

Fantastic Plastic really got into the movie and produced a number of kits based on the movie. I wanted the one Trudi flew for a vignette, but picked the wrong one. No matter the vignette will continue without Trudi.

At a recent meeting of the BPMS, one of the guys there said that he had this model and it was so difficult that it stopped him dead.  Having the same model, I was interested in seeing what was going on with this kit, so I took it out of the stash. 

 Upon opening it I saw immediately what he was talking about. What a mess! There is flash everywhere - not including the flash that keeps small parts together, which I think is good. But the other stuff. Every part id going to need attention.  Then there are these big blobs where the mold had previously been ripped away, so the next pour fills these voids with resin. One such piece is shown - 

Even the flat pieces have this odd wrinkled look to them - 

This was really disappointing. But having gotten in to garage kits in the mid 90's I am familiar with kits that were basically lumps of resin. Starting with the hull, which had that odd wrinkles what should be smooth parts  there was a lot of shaving, dremeling, and sanding to be done. Then some of the panel lines were incomplete, and bubbles in some of the smaller protuberances.  Additionally of of the boxy pieces that were molded on to the hull were very soft or misshapen. I cut them off and will replace them later on.   This caster, MMI, has some nerve giving these parts to FP as "professional" work. 

After four hours of work I had 4 parts together - 

More soon. Stay tuned.