... And then disaster struck!
When we last left off I was ready to gloss the plane to put some weathering along the panel lines. I took some of the Vallejo gloss clear, put it in the airbrush and sprayed. I came out in a pebbly like pattern. I sprayed more thinking the dots of gloss would merge and form one uniform coat. Didn't happen. But my big mistake was thinking "Well, there's gloss on it, I'll move ahead with the weathering."
I put some of Citadel's Nuln Oil on it and it acted as if you put a wash on any Flat paint. It was terrible. And not only that, since it was supposed to be gloss, I just sprayed over the canopy. Arrrgh! The canopy now looks frosted!
Luckily I was able to take a Q-tip and some water and get most of it off. Cant be said for the rest of it. In some spots a scrubbed so hard I revealed the primer. I lightly sanded the pebbly coating off, and now it was time for a complete repaint.
When repainting, I used V's Metallics Steel, instead of V's Model Color Steel. You would think it would be the same color, but no. The Metallics is a lot darker. Which in this case is good as it separates the two metallic colors.
Do I care about color accuracy? Not at this point. I just want it done. So here it is - Taa Daa ;)
Thanks for looking.
More progress was made on this plane. The first thing done this session was to mask off the areas to be metal and apply the metallic colors. The instructions call for 2 different metallics. They recommend a "polished" metal and a "natural" metal. They had "H" designations to the colors. Since I use Vallejo, I chose White Aluminum and Steel. To my eye, the colors still looked too close, so I will add a thinned layer of Smoke to the natural metal color.
Pulling off the masking tape, I looked up the conversion for RLM 2 (I think I said it was 4 earlier, sorry) and it turns out to be V's Green Gray.
After that I once again turn to my Metallics set and brushed on some burnt metal to the exhaust port.
While this model has it's problems and will definitely be a "2 footer"*, it's not looking too bad.
Feeling ambitions, I took some of my 1.5mm tape and created seat belts. I did this because test fitting the canopy, you could see right in and it looked a little bland. The 1.5 is still too wide, but it will do for now.
I didn't take a pic of it yet, but also during this session I added the canopy. I didn't fit correctly, but I just creatively painted it to make it blend in. Thanks for looking.
* A "2 footer" is a model that will look OK from 2 foot away, don't look closely. ;)
I call this part 1 a, because I ended up not having as much time as I thought I would have for this session.
This time around the tail planes and the wings went on. They had to be puttied on one side and then primed. I also got around to priming the canopy, but forgot to take a shot of it. Oh well, next time we mask off for the metal bits and then a coat of RLM 4 and we're done. ..
Needing a change from my Figures, I decided to pull the Special Hobby He-178 out of the stash. I first saw this in the New Kits section of SAMI magazine. It's not exactly my "genre" of X-planes and jets. But being it's "A first" I figured it's worth a spot on the shelf.
The kit is one sprue, with a clear styrene "glass" , an instrumentation film, and a piece of PE. Nice -
I started the build with the cockpit and thats when I realized this wasn't going to be a simple build. The cockpit has to include a seat, the stick and the foot pedal mount. The foot pedals are formed with PE, but there are no indications on the part thats the floor of the cockpit. Oh boy...
So I just had to guesstimate. Then getting it in the cockpit I had to keep cutting the floor down so the seat and the stick would show in the opening of the plane. Ugh. I'm not used to, and don't like hacking up models like this.
Finally I got the two fuselage halves together with a lot of glue and tape -
I needed to leave this for a while to thoroughly dry. So I went on to do the wings, which is in 3 parts. The wings "sorta" fit and again with lots of Tamiya Thin glue and some sanding afterward it went together. I moved to the landing gear which has PE folded around them. After getting the parts fold and glue to the styrene parts, I was ready for a break.
How can a kit have excellent PE parts, and the film for the instruments be so devoid if marking for where part should go? Check back for another chapter
