Sepp

I'd love to see the 109 treated to their new era standards - but if it has to be a Sea Fury, so be it

I have said this before on LSP, and I'm sure I'll say it again... I wish my dad was alive to see this - he'd weep with joy at the engineering in this build. Simply gobsmackingly awesome work.

Oooh, now I'm conflicted.

For me, the 262 - without any of the bolt-ons.

If only they'd make a full dress 1100 GoldWing.

Ta for the heads-up, I'll get on it!

Oooh, I didn't know there was a 346 kit available - another one for the "what if" shelf Nice job, looking good!

Oh, wow - that is beautiful!

I'm new to this airbrushing game and don't know any better... but so far, I've had no problems at all with ModelAir paint, beyond needing to keep the tip clean. No problems with adhesion on either of my completed builds, nor on the Viper that's underway - and that's with no primer coat at all. The only colour I've been under-impressed with (so far) is yellow, which was very translucent and needed several coats to look right but as I recall from my youth yellow was always that way. I'm using a Paashe Talon, and spray at 12-15psi undiluted - except for the varnish coats, which I thin roughly 3:1 with water. So far, so good - at least, good enough for me - and I like the fact that there are no nasty vapours to contend with. I agree that they brush very well.

That is lovely, that is. Bravo!

I love it. Nice job

Beautiful work - and very inspirational, too!

Long overdue (I only went for a coffee, and here we are, a fortnight later.... the service in this house is terrible) but herewith part the third: I've actually made quite a bit of progress, just for some reason or another I've not got round to posting anything. My main focus has been on what to do with the thrusters. They're only represented by black decals OOB, as you can see below and frankly, that ain't good enough - but, like all good Cylons I have a plan. More of that next time; for now, other progress. First, the engine exhausts. The kit part is very bland, and although the feathers are actually quite nice, I think this feature deserves some tarting up. There are a couple of options available. Please note: neither of the next two pics are mine; the first is from StarShipModeller's build, on their own site, the second from Green Strawberry's trade site. The first option is provided by ParaGrafix in the upgrade set that I used when working on the cockpit. It involves chopping the back face out of the kit part and inserting a PE replacement. It is an improvement, but leaves blooming great holes that lead to a large void. Sure, paint everything black and it (probably) wouldn't be seen, but I didn't like that idea, and it misses the fact that the Viper engines should have a cone in the middle of where that hole is. The second option is to use Green Strawberry's resin replacements. They are (mainly) very much better than what the kit offers. This option requires major surgery, removing the kit's exhausts completely plus some of the adjoining body/engine parts: So, out came the razor saw and a few mins later: aaaand it was at THIS point, having removed the exhausts from their casting blocks, that I discovered that all three in my set were distinctly oval. Nice, round centres, the etch slots in perfectly and the aft end of the exhausts are circular, but all are noticably egg shaped at the end that has to mate with the body (also, there should be a slightly smaller diameter ring between the body edge and the burner/exhaust rim. This is present on the kit, but GS have you remove it. If you leave it in place, the exhausts are then too long). Bum. So, out came my second kit from which I nicked various bits to get back to where I started. And so, engines. Take two. I decided I'd use the kit part, and add the GS etch in a completely incorrect but nevertheless (hopefully) visually interesting representation of what a Tylium-burning engine exhaust might look like. I discovered that with gentle persuasion, two of the three GS etch parts could after a fashion be slotted into the kit exhaust. The first lies flat against the existing rear face, although the "teeth" slightly bend up slightly, as the gaps are slightly smaller on the kit part, than GS's offering. (Hopefully you can make this out in the centre can, below. Clot that I am, I'd added a black scrub before thinking of taking a picture, d'oh!) The second part was then laid on top and gently pressed downwards to form a curved ring that almost meets the rear face and sits on the shoulders of the columns moulded into the kit part. All held in place with neat gloss varnish, as are the centre cones. After paint (Vallejo ModelAir gunmetal and red/blue/smoke clear, all brushed on) and some satin varnish: I quite like it. Your mileage may differ Next up, thrust reversers. In what may someday be hailed as the worst photograph ever to appear on t'internet, you can see that the Viper II has extendable reverser panels located behind the main engine cutouts: these are not represented on the kit (side note: I always wondered what the "beware of blast" stencils were referring to... I've watched the series many, many times and never noticed this detail before!) so out came the scribers - a nice simple job. The size of the panel is a best guess... I just followed the edges of the cutout. You can see the narrow ring I referred to earlier to the right of the reverser panel - GS have you remove this. Finally, for this update, (and I admit, this is still ongoing... I haven't decided how far to go with it, yet) the fuselage panel "strakes". In the pic below, if you look to the aft end of the open panel on the fuselage, you can see four diagonal bands that wrap around ... well, whatever it is: The kit's representation of this is not very good at all. For a start, there's only three of them, and they run right across the bay. So I've started trying to gently coax something better out of the plastic: [top pic with OOB for comparison] I'm still a long way from what you see on the studio Viper but as the two sides have to look the same and there's detail between the bands, I'm going to take this slowly and not get too enthusiastic. At least there's now the correct number of them! That's all for now - next time: thrusters, and an old lesson learned again. Sepp

Love it! I'm really looking forward to numbers two and three.

I'm still waiting for my two - from two different UK suppliers Come on chaps - get a move on!

You are quite correct - I had forgotten that the QIMs included the cowl; please consider my comment modified accordingly. Although, I still reckon that it was probably blue.

My pleasure You might have some joy speaking with these people: https://aircorpslibrary.com/ - they might be able to point you in the right direction.

514 FS assigned ID colour was blue... can't see why they'd use black cowls. In the top pic, the blue parts of the star and bar and cowl look the same shade of grey, and they are distinctly different from the black QIM stripe - make of that what you will! In the pics that appear , I will grant you, to show a black cowl, the bits of the star and bar that are visible and the green anti-dazzle panel look distinctly black, too, so possibly an artifact of the film stock used. It's obviously a sunny day (hence the shadows) but the pics generally look stopped down, and the grass is amost completely washed out, so colours must be suspect. Me, I'd go for a blue cowl - but maybe not so bright as the profile would suggest, same as or close to the national markings colour. I'm no expert, just my 2¢/p.

Thanks for the kind words, both! The one benefit of living on my own, is that rolling eyes are a thing of the past ...

Well, it's been a while since I posted an update, but I haven't sat around doing nothing... well, not all the time, anyway. Major sub-assemblies such as wings and landing gear are done but no pics here as they'll speak for themselves when their time comes. Suffice to say that the earlier 'poor fit and/or condition' theme continues throughout - as an example: the wingtip cutout is supposed to have a nice, smooth edge. Note also that despite the clamp, the wing halves don't properly mate... some work required here. However, moving on. The engine inlets feature louvres that open for flight within a planet's atmosphere. The two side engines are reasonably rendered, but the top inlet is just a blank. Apologies for blurry pic! So, I cut the blank faces off, glued them together and used overlapped pieces of styrene sheet to make louvre petals: Roughly shaped, here - the piece will sit a little further back in the inlet throat than Moebius provided it, so there's some shape fettling to be done, but you get the idea. Next up, the cockpit. The ParaGrafix PE set really makes a difference but really showed up the fact that the kit's seat is nothing like the one used in the production Vipers (refer to pic in my first post to get a better idea just how bad it is), so it had to go. Green Strawberry to the rescue. A highly recommended addition! and after paint and decals, we have: Paint is a 3:1 mix of Vallejo ModelAir Dark Gull Grey and Grey Blue, decals are a mix of kit, Airscale and ParaGrafix. Some of the decals were really, really small. Vallejo satin varnish over all that. The PG decals are really grainy - next time I build one of these, I'll make my own DRADIS and radar displays. I'm quite pleased how it came out - the volume knob on the left panel even has a radius marking on it. Whoever it was who posted the tip about using the end of a cocktail stick to paint lights/buttons - thank you! It worked a treat [Side note to purists: The studio Viper cockpits were blue oversprayed with a thin silver finish. I am wary of recreating that, as studio set paint finishes are often massaged to get a desired effect on camera. Canon is not necessarily canon!] To further annoy the stitch counters, the ergonomics of the production cockpits made my eyes bleed so mine has a more traditional layout, with an attitude indicator top middle, ASI to the left and altimeter to the right of it. Other instruments more or less follow the main thrust of the studio design. My pilot might want to get their turn co-ordinator looked at though! Deciding what is correct and what is not is very difficult with these birds. There are no less than six different cockpit layouts (with smaller Dradis vs. conventional altimeter on the upper panel, with radar vs. an artificial horizon on the lower left panel, and with/without lower right systems screen) used at one time or another, not counting the anomalous use of Mk VII cockpits in Mk IIs. Continuity was not their thing, or maybe they were reflecting a lively mend and make do culture.... fortunately for me! More shortly, but to avoid a single, huge post (and I because I need a coffee) that's all for now. Back soon! Sepp

How do you think we on this side of the pond cope with some attempts from west of the wet to pronounce Worcestershire or Warwickshire? ... then again, we (well, some of us) have our own problems with Shrewsbury.

That is a very good point - especially with the laminated/rubberised ones that are all the go these days... Decals would be too thin. Nice tip.

Oh, lawdy ... I'll be all over one of these! Maybe two.

Very nice I can't read anything about the American Civil War without hearing the voice of either David McCullough or Shelby Foote. In this case, it was Mr. McCullough who narrated the historical part of your post for me

Whilst we're delving into the unlikely: Mistubishi G3M. If you wanted to make the kit uncomplicated and tried hard, you could probably reduce the kit's part count to below 30. It was even designed to be uncomplicated, with no self sealing tanks, armour or - initally at least - defensive armament. Lots of options, though - bombs/torpedo, with or without defensive armament, civil (including the round-the-world J-BACI), the Green Cross FI-03. There's even the much-improved Nakajima G3M3 versions to play with. It'll never happen.