Alex

Weathering looks great! Really nice way to wrap this one up.

I was relating this story to my wife (who was born in Ukraine, and thus as you’d expect speaks fluent Russian) over dinner. She didn’t seem all that impressed by the prospect of a new-tool Zvezda kit and the likely excellentness of such a thing. But I was informed that it’s properly pronounced “zvez-dA” with the emphasis on the final A. So now I can stop saying it wrong ;-) Zvezda means “star” in Russian, as you might guess from the company logo.

It sure ain't.

Got decals in the mail today from Nazca Decals (purveyors of every Latin American airliner scheme you can possibly imagine). Unfortunately, they sent me the AeroPeru set for the B757-200: Rather than the L-1011 Tristar set. The guy was very apologetic when I emailed him, though, and said he'd send the right ones out ASAP. Certainly they'll get here before I need them, at the rate this is progressing. So, the only consequence is that now I'm going to have to order the brand-new 2021 new-tool Zvezda 757-200 kit as soon as it's released. Bummer ;-)

I decided to actually mix up some 5-minute epoxy to attach the engine/cowl and the landing gear, in the interest of maximum strength for the bond. Here are the rest of the bits and bobs that attach underneath the airframe. For both the drop tank and the tail hook I drilled and ran a piece of wire into the part and drilled a corresponding hole into the fuselage (same as I did with the LG) to add strength to the bond. For anyone contemplating this kit I would recommend doing this all over the place - the kit provides little dimples to indicate where parts are to go, but there

Yeah, that would have been an effective approach, in hindsight. I guess I could still try to mask the edge of the red and shoot some more Alclad over that white fringe.

So this is what it looks like with the clearcoat on and all the tape removed. There's some annoying aliasing of the white layer under the red tail. Not much I can do about that now. In the future I guess the ideal approach would be to unmask and re-mask offset by just a fraction of a millimeter before painting the second color. Because these should definitely take me longer to complete than they already do... A different angle. One positive is that there's basically zero paint overspray anywhere on the Alclad - so that's a win for trying to be thorough/careful

Chapeau! Wonderful model.

Sprayed the black (actually very dark gray, as I find that pure black always looks artificial/toylike on scale models). Here it is with all the tape removed to show the white and red as well, although you can't really see the distinction between white tape and white paint on the wings. As I mentioned before, I'm going to need to overpaint all three colors with a layer of clear flat (or more precisely clear nearly-flat - I'll probably go 1/3 gloss and 2/3 flat as a mix). As should be visible above, the three colors differ in their sheen significantly (white

Hope it helps. Please let us know how you get on and if you discover and other useful things. I’m still very much a beginner when it comes to Alclad. If anything I think I might even try smaller sections in the future. Possibly spraying at even lower pressure too (I’m already using like 12 psi).

Here’s hoping! I’m sure that I’ll need to do some bits of touch up here and there, but hopefully not too much.

So I sprayed the red (Mr Color C-385 IJN insignia red), and then decided that I didn't like the fuselage side hinomaru - it was too small. So I went and made a larger mask, and re-sprayed it. With the unfortunate consequence that this hinomaru will end up being a bit more saturated red than the other markings. I'm going to try and not lose sleep over it. Tomorrow I'll paint the black.

A little bit of work on this model. I assembled the wings (which was lots of work due to the need to thin the trailing edges, and I still haven't dealt with smoothing anything out). One of them was noticeably kinked. However, some gentle heating with the heat gun followed by persuasion with clamps has got it straightened out. You can see in the top photo that the fit of wings to fuselage isn't terrible. There's a small gap, and unfortunately that gap is on the upper surface if you set the wings with what looks like the correct dihedral. I have an idea on

There are still lots of cycles of this to go through... Next I need to mask out white and spray red. Then mask over red and spray black. Then take off the last two rounds of masking and do any touch-ups where white/red/black may not be perfect. Then spray clear flat. Then I can peel the rest of the masking up and see how much more retouching of the NMF I get to do... Fortunately I think this GB runs through August...?

Slowly progressing this. I finished the Alclad, then masked off everything that is meant to remain as "bare metal". I will paint white first, and to make sure that the red looks the same everywhere, I need to paint everything that will eventually be red, white. Along with what remains white, of course. So after spraying what seemed at the time like a gallon of white paint at the model: Now, in a familiar pattern, I can *wait until tomorrow* and then mask off the bits that will remain white. I cut the tail codes out quickly on the Silhouette, along with s