Alex

Wouldn’t THAT be something? It would be just shy of 5 feet long at that scale… It is 1:144, as are all my airliner models (I’m a tad OCD about scale matching up). And as far as the extended tips go, I’m only as correct as Tamiya is - I took them at their word that this was the right option!

Thanks, guys.

Jumping ahead a bit, here's the painting and decals. Started by painting all-over gloss black. Then aluminum. And then masked off the parts to remain NMF to paint the white. I decided to do the "early" scheme of the two offered by the kit, so the vertical stab needs to remain bare metal. After the white... I painted some red at the top of the vertical stab rather than try and get the decals to wrap over the top smoothly. The decals that came with the kit worked nicely. Thin, easy to apply, snugged down well with just a bit of MicroSol. Overall this was a fine kit. Decals and some of the details, like the the resin exhausts, were high points. Some real short-run kind of fit issues were low points. If you tackle this one, expect to do a fair amount of filling/sanding/shaping to get things to line up. But it's great to have a kit available of this classic of the early jet age. According to planespotters.net, this aircraft (HB-IDA) was delivered to Swissair in 1960, and was operated by them until 1967. So it overlapped with my existence on earth, but only by a couple of years!

Thanks all. This was a great GB, with lots of great builds. Obviously there's a lot of Spitfire enthusiasm here ;-)

Thanks! For the future, my blue is MRP-119 - specifically meant to be WW2 RAF Azure.

Thanks!

Finally! I'm reasonably pleased with how well this came out after the struggles I had with painting. One fly in the ointment is that the cowling pieces don't fit perfectly, in contrast to the other two of Tamiya's "super warbird" kits I've done (Zero and Mustang) where they are perfect. Of course it could always be that I warped the engine frames by cramming scratchbuilt stuff onto the motor. It took quite bit of scrubbing to get the chipping to happen, but I think it looks OK. I'll probably end up displaying it with the bonnet and one side panel off the engine bay: At least I now have a Spitfire on my WW2 fighter shelf! That's been an omission for too long. Now I've got to get back to my DC-8. I'm eager to wrap that project up. I've been experiencing some flagging mojo on airplane model projects recently, and so I've got something very different planned for my next build. So time to clear the bench for that.

Progress. Landing gear on, masking off. I've done all the coats of paint/pastel that I want to do, so the next step is to see if I can actually get that chipping business to happen.

I shot some additional Mr Color Clear Gloss over the decals and then worked some brown pastel dust into the surface details to emphasize them. Next I'll shoot a coat of clear flat and add some additional pastel color. Getting close now.

Thanks for the encouraging words, guys. I decided, since I needed to get into the decals anyway to do the stencils, I would try to fix my issues by using the kit decals for the side roundels and codes. I managed to get the pretty tightly down using Micro Sol. I went ahead and painted the tail flash using VERY de-tacked Tamiya tape to mask, thankfully without pulling off any more paint. So I'm hopeful that it will end up looking at least decent.

It is interesting that they assume, as everyone did until the last couple of decades, that a perfectly smooth, flat surface was aerodynamically fastest. They would be amazed to see all of the cunning little bumps, divots, chevrons, raised strips, etc that festoon racing bikes, swimsuits, etc these days in an effort to create micro-turbulence over moving surfaces. Because the wind tunnel don't lie, and smoothest is not fastest...

I'd be way more worried about Imron guy than MEK guy. Your skin is suprisingly resistant to (some) chemicals in transient exposure, but your lungs are definitely not. I got a respirator last year to use in combination with with my high-flow spray booth, and I love it - don't know why I went without it for so long. I really enjoy NOT being able to smell the lacquer thinner at all....

This was going really well, as they say, until it wasn't. I thought that the hardest part of painting these roundels was going to be doing the ones under the wings, with the big bulge that has to be masked over. I started out by painting a white background for each roundel, to avoid the camo pattern aliasing through. To avoid having the white layer visible at the edge of the finished roundel, I cut these masks for the white 0.5mm smaller than the "real" roundel masks. That presents the challenge of removing them and getting the second mask on perfectly centered, but it avoids that white showing. Things were proceeding just fine. Looks a bit like a Zero there... Even the masks under the wings worked out; some gentle heating with the heat gun on its lowest setting helped the masks conform. When I needed to mask the center of those, instead of trying to get tape down over that bulge, I just made a little ball of the black putty snake material and squished it on: Worked out well - I did not expect these to go so smoothly. Unfortunately, there were signs that something was amiss as soon as I unmasked the white base roundels. I re-sprayed that Dark Earth when the completed roundel was still masked off, but sadly... The problem is much worse than that. Note that this is no where near where I was applying the chipping medium, so I must have just screwed up cleaning the surface before painting. This is a complete failure of the paint layer - primer peeling off the plastic. Not sure how I managed to not get it clean, but it's water under the bridge now. So I'm unsure what I'm going to do now. There's no way to fix it with paint, I don't think, unless I want to strip the whole area and re-paint, which I don't want to do. I thought of possibly trying to "fix" it by applying the kit decal over it. At this point I would have to do the ID codes with decals as well, as more masking in this area is probably just asking for more peeled paint. So I could do that and get it to look "finished", but it would never look good like that. It would be impossible to get a uniform panel line treatment over a combination of painted and decaled insignia, for example, so I would have to just skip that step entirely. Alternatively, I could just park it on the SOD and try to remember the clean the damn model better before painting in the future.

This is always time-consuming... But the results are worth it. After cleaning up the PLW I shot a coat of clear flat with a little bit of white in it to help fade the bright blue. I then made up a little palette of pastels to add some more fade and tonal variation. Going for the dusty, worn-out look here. Below is the result. If I'm careful, this is all the masking off I should need to shoot the topsides. I started with overall Middle Stone, shooting a mist of white over the top again to fade the color. I decided to approach the camo in stages, so I did not have to wrestle with holding onto a model completely covered in putty snakes. Step 1. I worked out a convenient way to mask around the snakes. Placing a piece of semi-translucent wide tape on top of the snake, it's easy to trace the line of contact with a sharpie. Then remove the tape, cut along the line, and reapply. This was the result of step 1. Step 2 was the starboard wing and the cowling. And then the rest. Next up I need to cut my masks out and paint the roundels and codes.

I really never do car models, but I saw the release announcement for this one a few months back and for some reason it caught my eye. Italeri has offered this kit in a different form (a blue version from the 1930 Monaco GP) for a few years now, but I found the yellow one compelling, especially so since it is a machine piloted by a female racer in the 1928 Targa Florio. Given that ladies driving race cars aren't super-common even in the 2020s, one doing so in the 1920s was cutting-edge indeed. Not sure when I'll get around to building this, but it'll surely be a nice addition to the collection when I do.

Found this via The Modeling News… Some mind-blowing stuff here.

Super work on scratching that body kit. Tell your son he done good!

Beautiful! I hope that my granddaughter winds up as artistically talented as you are!

Started out by painting the wing roots with Alclad Aluminum. I then masked around the area in which chipping is going to happen, to avoid getting the chipping medium in places where it can only serve to trip me up by having paint flake off where I don't want it to. Then sprayed the AK chipping fluid, diluted like 4:1 with AK thinner. This strong dilution allowed me to spray a nice uniform thin coat with no gloppy texture at all. The clever magnets that Tamiya supplies to fix the engine cowling pieces in place work well enough to hold them on against gravity, but only just. It was clear the first time I put them on that an airbrush would blow them straight off, and thus that I'd have to paint that part separate from the fuselage, and just make darn sure to line the camo pattern up. To make things a little easier I taped the forward cowling sections together from the inside, so I can at least paint it as a single unit. I decided to start the paintjob with the undersides, however. The thought is to take it through most of the weathering process so that once I flip the thing over and mask off the underside, I won't have much of anything left to do there. So I gave it a coat of MRP Azure Blue... I followed that with a coat of Tamiya X-22 clear gloss. When that's fully dry (tomorrow morning) I'll go over it with enamel panel liner to pick out all of the exquisite detail that Tamiya molded into these pieces, and maybe just a bit of oil paint dirt aft of the engine.

If you have a Silhouette machine you should be able to design the roundels very quickly in the Silhouette Studio software, which you can download from their website. It's straightforward to have it make circles of whatever specific size you need.

OK, some more results. First thing to know about the above image is that for the three large panels I only wet the top half (for about 10 minutes) prior to attempting to chip off paint. The MRP was by far the hardest to remove, and in the lower half, where it was not pre-wet, even the masking fluid did not fully come off. Getting small chips with the MRP involved extended scrubbing with fine steel wool in a small circular pattern. You can see a spot near the top of the dark brown area where I went back-and-forth too much and got these linear scratches (which might be correct for some situations but I don't like them here). You can see also on the MRP panel that the area around the chipped paint, which got scrubbed but not hard enough to remove the paint, has had the lighter top layer I sprayed on removed. This is a nice simulation of oxidized paint getting rubbed off by foot traffic and I'll use it for sure. With the two aqueous acrylics, on the top (wetted) half all of the paint that had crazed over the raised areas in the chipping layer came off instantly as soon as I swiped a toothbrush over them. Much too loose. Clearly to use this chipping fluid with these paints you need a much thinner layer. I will use it diluted a lot with AK thinner in the future. The Vallejo paint just looks terrible in general, and I will not mess with it further. On the lower right you see where I scrubbed off the AK paint without even wetting it first - this was the result of just lightly scrubbing with a wet soft toothbrush. For a situation where you wanted most of the paint to come off, like the quintessential WW2 Japanese fighter in a tropical jungle, or a wreck scene, this might be a good thing. In the small Mr Hobby section bottom center, I was able to chip off paint without it being "seeded" by any masking fluid. It just took longer to get started. So what am I going to do with all of this? Since I'm only trying to chip a small area, and I'm generally comfortable using MRP paints, AND I like the MRP colors, I think that I'm going to go that way. I will use a light coat of diluted chipping solution only on the wing roots, and a small, carefully applied dose of masking fluid to get the chipping started. One other thing I've observed is that you can nucleate chipping in specific places by very lightly scarring the paint surface. On the MRP and Mr Hobby panels I tried banging on the paint with the bristles of a small, very stiff nylon brush. You could not see any effect of doing this visually, but sure enough those areas loosened up first under sustained assault with the steel wool wad. So this is potentially an alternative to the masking fluid strategy to direct where the chipping starts. For showing a lot of paint loss in specific areas, a toothpick works well, but you have to use it VERY judiciously. I'd probably save that for dragging it along a panel line to lose all the paint on the panel edge. Anyway, I now think I'm ready to paint the actual model.

So I'm just partway through this, and already I've learned some things, including some counterintuitive ones. I started with the MRP paints, and did the masking for the Dark Earth with my putty snakes and some Tamiya tape to avoid overspray. You can see below that the MRP paint was weakly enough bonded to the chipping fluid layer that anywhere tape touched it, it pulled away. Critically, you can see adjacent to the pulled-away areas little bits of paint that pulled up off the substrate but stayed attached (lighter colored) presumably because the paint film itself is pretty strong. I have not tried yet to manually chip this paint, but that aspect now worries me. More annoying, you can see that for the two truly water-based acrylics, AK and Vallejo, they immediately reacted with the dried chipping fluid, creating unwanted surface texture and crazing of the paint (especially the Vallejo). I may have put the chipping fluid on too thick, but this is annoying (and did not happen with the lacquer-based MRP or in the last experiment with the Mr Hobby alcohol-based acrylic diluted with it's own thinner). Finally in the bottom center you can see where I shot a little of the Mr Hobby Middle Stone to confirm how much greener it is than all the others. Plus, for this little patch, I followed Kev's suggestion and diluted it with Lacquer thinner, which worked just fine.

Also took some time this morning to design masks for this project, and slipped in some wheel masks for my DC-8 while I was at it.

Back to this project for round 2 of chipping experiments. I've obtained the below: With the following goals: 1. Try out some different acrylic Middle Stone options to find a better shade. I have here Vallejo and AK offerings. In the bottle both look less green than the Mr Hobby stuff, so that's promising. For this test I'll just use the Mr Hobby Dark Earth with them. 2. Explore the possibility of chipping with MRP lacquers, so I have both Middle Stone and Dark Earth here. 3. Do a paint job more like the actual plan for the model - i.e. add some light layers of whitened color or just dilute white to simulate oxidation/photobleaching of the paint. The final product needs to look like it's been baking in the North African sun for a while. I want to do this to practice the look, and also to see how much harder it is to chip with additional paint layers there. I already have white Vallejo paint, and Vallejo thinner, so I didn't need to order those. Ditto for the MRP. So far I've flipped my sheet of styrene over, primed it, covered it with Alclad, and then with the AK chipping solution. I'm now waiting for that to dry. Stay tuned.

I have the fuselage and flying surfaces all de-seamed and polished up now. I have also done the engine pylons. Hopefully these will look good under a coat of primer. Next step is go get the wings to join up cleanly, which is going to take some finessing based on a trial fit.