red Dog

Awesome choice of decoration, this will be stunning

. click on the see next topic, ignoring that new annoucement and the rumors and request that will go along with it sorry ...

Very convincing shadowing in theat cockpit fanes, it's looking great The IP I confess is all black to me

Thank you gents for all your comments, they are much appreciated No. But I can help anyway All it takes really is buying a white blank decal sheet of paper. It's readily available by most online stores. The only trick is to pick a white and/or a transparent (for this project you need a white one) and make sure you buy the style of material relevant to your type of printer: inkjet or laser. 1. Save the artwork above, on your computer - That is real size, meaning that you won't have loss of quality as you won't have to resize it. 2. Print it (best to make that from an image manager software) on normal white paper first, just as you would print anything as usual, just make sure to use the 'best print' option 3. Make sure you mark the way your paper goes into your inkjet printer - I usually mark the paper before printing with a small cross and then according to the position of the cross after printing I know in which direction to insert the next blank paper to get the printing at the exact same spot I want. 4. Get your white inkjet decal sheet, cut a piece of about the same size as the decal you want to print, a bit larger on all 4 sides. 5. Tape the piece of white decal paper on your normal sheet of paper, on top of your previous print (step2) 6. Reinsert that paper into the printer - same direction as step 3 (that's why the cross) 7. Print it again, Don't change the setting at all. 8. If you followed these steps perfectly, the bit of decal sheet taped to your paper should get out of the printer with the artwork printed on it 9. Give the printed decal a coat of hi gloss varnish (brand of your chosing) 2 light coats, one vertically, one horizontally and let it dry for the night. Don't overdo it. I know it's hard to resist 10. Cut the decal at the exact white/colour border (in your case the decals are rectangular and that's very easy to do) 11. Apply as normal decals ans seal them as usual, treat them carefully while applying and swiping the water out of them Learning to do it might sound complicated, but it is very easy and might help your builds in the long run. If for whatever reason you can't do it. I can print another set, varnish them and send it to you. Then you can start at step10. Cheers Olivier

As I said, this is probably the best engineerd model I ever built. It was a real joy to build this model. It may sound obvious but unfortunately I don't built much tamiya models, but the quality of this kit was really astounding I replaced the IP because the Yahu model was really better, I replaced the wheels because the 3 spoke wheels were not included and I replaced the side door because the tamiya was lacking depth. And of course I used custom masks. But the rest of the kit really doesn't need anything from aftermarket, and this is from a guy who usually buy everyaftermarket possible for all my kits. So this was really an exception for me. Here are the final pictures thanks for looking and feel free to comment if there's anything I could have done better.

Thank you very much Richard One last thing worth mentionning: The model instructions offer two ways to display the aircraft. On that great stand for an inflight or on it's wheel. Both options have the auxiliary fuel tanks installed, which is a clever way to install the aircraft on it's stand as 2 fuel tanks are provided. One which is screwed to the stand and the other that you can remove from the aircraft on it's wheels when you want to place the model on the stand. As you can see from the picture above, there are two rather holes in the belly of the Spitfire. If you reinstall the separate fuel tank, the holes are covered as it is where the pin of the tank inserts firmly in place. But if you don't want to use the fuel tank, the instructions don't say anything about covering these 2 offending holes, granted they are not quite visible when the spitfire is on its wheels Knowing Tamiya quest for perfection, I thought no way they would allow that to happen. There must be something planned for these holes !! And sure enough part 9 of the double sprue where the fuel tank are attached is meant to cover these holes. It's just not referenced in the instructions: they Don't even require glue: Much better for my model here that obviously doesn't carry the ferry tank.

I can't weather this model as it's kept shiny and immaculate. So I just gave a very subtle spash of tamiya brown wash. For the same reason I also wil not spray a semi gloss coat, i'll stick to the current gloss. I did spray matt varnish on the gear and tyres and the exhaust and the walkway area. The walkways are not painted black but there is a very visible change of brightness when you look at the walkway and compare them to the rest of the wing. I suppose that these area have been sprayed on the real aircrfat with a kind of transparent stronger protective coat. I initially wanted to give them a mist of light brown, but in the end I decided against it and gave them simply a coat or two of matt varnish. The difference is sublte yet remains visible. I gave them a quick brush with concrete pastels to try though. Not sure if I'll remove that or not. I think it highlight too much the rivets and panel line. I will remove that one and try to apply pigments around the panel lines and rivets instead... The exhaust are the only real parts that needs weathering. This was done on the black painting with first a splash of streaking rust effect, then concrete pigments at the base of the exhaust and black pigment at the exhaust hole. The pictures below show the exhaust before application of the pigment fixers which always tends to tone down light coloured pigments. Final steps were to add the non standard antennas for a modern spitfire and gluing the canopy and resin access door in place. I replaced the access door because the stock tamiya part was lacking in detail and depth. I think it's a very visible detail and that was one of the few part from this kit benefiting from a resin remplacement. (the others being the wheels because the stock parts didn't provide the 3 stokes wheels I needed for this model The rear view mirror is not fitted but a handle and a ball Inside the sliding canopy were Added, they are not visible in the above picture. Just a few nitpicking details to nail and this model will be completed.

Well, here the decal are not very thick. The issue come rather from the need to cut the homemade decal close to the colour border and doing so will inevitably remove a bit of colour. So the white is the decal paper, not the thickness. A quick base paint spray with a post it protecting the inner decal will make all that invisible. and the final gloss coat will blend all that together With custom decals, you control thickness with the amount of gloss you spray over them before applying them. I always tend to overdo it thinking that I need a lot of gloss to protect the decal from water. But I learned to control that and in this case for instance, it's one vertical spray, then one horizontal spray with the acrylic MRP gloss and they went on beautifully on the model. One might think that an acrylic gloss might not be suitable because of the contact with the water, but no issue at all.

Nice truck. Greek F-16 are not easy to paint, this came out as outstanding.

Great model. Compliments I can't stop thinking how huge that model is Is that an adult chair on the left of that picture? Wish I had the place to display it, I'd be all over this.

Custom decals were successful. This was probably the last major challenge of this quick build and I'm happy to report that all went fine. The above artwork were printed on a white inkjet decal paper and a quick coat of MRP supergloss was sprayed to protect them from water. One of the two green background (right most) was good enough and the decals were applied to the model: It's still quite visible with the picture, but quite less in real and I'll done it a bit down further with touch ups and further varnish. (some weathering marks I can't see with naked eyes need to be cleaned as well (these pictures are unforgiving ) the indian head turned out pretty good. No way this could have been done with transparent decal paper, at least not without a white paint background. There is still one white bit I need to remove, but that won't be a big problem. Logo prop were satisfactory as well. The white cut line can't be avoided but a quick touch up will solve that before the usual semigloss clear coat

I admire your result. I have been there and done that, got the tee shirt, made almost plastic fly and nowhere did I come close to working in such a tiny environment with lights in a model !! Well done. The end result will be cracking

Nice result. I'm guilty for the white backrgound colour first. Been bitten by that before, especially on contrasted camouflage Under the roundels. When you mix your own paint with thinner, (and when you like it very light) I still would advocate having the white background. MRP might spray dense enough not to need that white base coat, but if you thin gunze with alcool a bit too much, you certainly will need it a good base layer. Beside, however you turn it, you still need 4 colours. Since there is white in the RAF roundel, then you don't really loose any time or make it more complicated than what it should be by spraying first a full white roundel… IMHO Whatever way you use you always have to uncover the mask, paint and at least cover some paint with mask again, and that's imho the tedious bit because of the alignement issue or the shape the vynil masks may sometime take. Whichever your method It's well worth the work as I agree with you the end result is much better than decals

Thanks guys, beats decals anytime I'd think. The only tiny details that are missing is the indian head and the tribute to the pilot. Prop markings are also not corresponding to the decals in the tamiya box. So I quickly made a tiny decal artwork that I printed on wite inkjet decal paper. I made two background colour to account for the print/Paint difference, normally one of them should match at least I painted a bit of plastic and scanned it to get the closest hex value which then was used for the background colour of the white decal. Using transparent decal would not be ideal as the background paint is too dark for the light coloured artwork

So I finally repainted it completely and went with the proven route of Gunze H73 & H75 Once camouflage was replaced, the roundels could finally be painted. To do that I will use Custom masks from DN models. The roundels of SL721 are not standard as the top wings roundels are larger than usual and the Bottom wing roundels have the yellow border which normally occurs only on dark surfaces. So decals couldn't be used anyway. Painting roundels are time consuming and whichever method you use you will always need to remove and replace masks. The trick is to stay centred at all costs. For the colour of the roudels I used: white, marking yellow (MRP) red is a mix of XF7 and XF68 (3/4 + 1/4) and the blue is H322 (blue angel blue) + a drop of black All colours where checked against the tamiya decals and saved for later use. First step is to backpaint a white layer. This is mostly necessary for the yellow outline As you can see, masks have been marked with diagonals to ease up the aligning process later on. The internal masks have been replaced all together on the white, then the yellow outline and red centre masks have been removed and painted respectfully in their colour The next step was a bit tedious as the mask for the yellow was a real pain to replace correctly. Once satisfied, I removed the large centre mask and painted the blue The AU J code masks where then placed. As with the roundels, I feel it's safer to stick all the masks together using strips of tape and then only remove the letter with a new sharp X-acto blade. That will ensure that the inner mask for the A will remain perfectly centred. Of course, there's no way to do that with the J in this case. Some more tape for overspray protection and the codes where painted in MRP sky. Next up are the SL721 and OO-XVI registration. That's probably the smallest masks I ever painted. These letters are very tiny but in the end came out great Spraying black I also painted the walkway lines on top of the wings It took me the full week and week end to get to this point, but the end is near for this "quick" build I'm glad for the help of DN models and the custom work they are able to do, it saved me a lot of time and trouble.