ALF18 Posted July 6, 2011 Author Share Posted July 6, 2011 Neo Nice to see you back in business - moving is such a pain! I just completed a 'move' myself - all my files to a new computer, after the old one died Sunday. ALF Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hagar Posted August 11, 2011 Share Posted August 11, 2011 Hey there Dan, hows the F-5 coming? Looks good in primer. James Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ALF18 Posted September 3, 2011 Author Share Posted September 3, 2011 Hey there Dan, hows the F-5 coming? Looks good in primer. James James Sorry for "going dark" for so long... I haven't touched this or any other kit since the end of June. Since then, I've been preparing course material for the 3 courses I'm teaching at the aviation college this fall. Every spare minute for the last 2 months has gone into that. For the foreseeable future (say for the next 3 to 4 weeks), that will still be the case. Following that, I should be able to get back into it. I haven't even had time to browse or post here. I'll let you know when I'm back into it. I've done an initial job on the camo paint (looks too horrible to post for now), and I've managed to come up with some decals as well (home made, with help from another modeler here in Chicoutimi). Stay tuned, some day... Hope things at the museum in Cold Lake are good. ALF Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ALF18 Posted March 2, 2012 Author Share Posted March 2, 2012 Surprise! After a VERY long hiatus, I got back into this kit. Real life (multiple courses to prepare - new job teaching since last summer) got in the way, and this kit and decals are a real bear... First the painting. I dabbled with a couple colours, as you can see in this shot with an underwing tank. I finally settled on a dark gray and dark green, Tamiya colours XF-24 and XF-61. Here's what it looked like after painting. I went for the rough and not so pristine look, since so many of these aircraft looked a bit worse for wear as far as wrap-around paint scheme went. I promise to post more pics in the next few days. Sorry to be away for so long! ALF Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shark64 Posted March 2, 2012 Share Posted March 2, 2012 Welcome back. I was wondering where you went. nice CF-5.Like the camo look. Oliver Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ax365 Posted March 2, 2012 Share Posted March 2, 2012 Hi ALF. Sent you an e-mail yesterday and I figured I'd stumble by here and see if there was any progress on your build. Lo and behold... She looks good. Certainly has that 'lived in' look like a pair of comfortable and faded jeans. Keep at it buddy. Mike Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hagar Posted March 2, 2012 Share Posted March 2, 2012 Hey Dan welcome back. I was looking for updates a few weeks back. Lost the job at the museum, not enough education, but I'm back at the sim. Wanting to build a 104 and CF-116 for the building. I'll keep watching this. James Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ALF18 Posted March 3, 2012 Author Share Posted March 3, 2012 Welcome back. I was wondering where you went. nice CF-5.Like the camo look. Oliver Oliver I didn't go anywhere - literally and figuratively, especially when it comes to building models. I have finally poked my head out from my school class prep work, and decided to do more than just create exams and lesson plans. Glad to have you back viewing. ALF Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ALF18 Posted March 3, 2012 Author Share Posted March 3, 2012 Hi ALF. Sent you an e-mail yesterday and I figured I'd stumble by here and see if there was any progress on your build. Lo and behold... She looks good. Certainly has that 'lived in' look like a pair of comfortable and faded jeans. Keep at it buddy. Mike Mike Got your e-mail - working on a reply for tomorrow or so. You had me grinning over your rental car adventures! Thanks for stopping by. I have a bunch more pics to post, so here goes... The tail will have 419 squadron blue flashes. I used a silver ink pen to make the background for the anti-collision light. I then used a permanent lumocolour marker to make the red part. Not a pretty job, but the tail flash will be covering the outline. Next, did the fronts of the tip tanks with a silver pen background, and the felt markers for the light lens effects. Starting to look a bit more like a CF-5. The biggest headache is what to do about decals. I'm not happy with the conversion kit decals - they are very sparse, and not quite the era I'm after. So I measured the tails and started looking into doing some custom-made decals with the help of a friend here who has dabbled in his own decals at times. ALF Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ALF18 Posted March 3, 2012 Author Share Posted March 3, 2012 Hey Dan welcome back. I was looking for updates a few weeks back. Lost the job at the museum, not enough education, but I'm back at the sim. Wanting to build a 104 and CF-116 for the building. I'll keep watching this. James James Sorry to hear you're not at the museum any more. Happy, though, that you got back into the sim. When are they shutting down for upgrades? I've heard the one here is closing in April for several months. Maybe you can shoot me a PM with details, if you don't mind... For the CF-104 for the building, have you decided what era? I suppose Huck will be pushing for the variegated green he flew, but the early NMF with Dave Winter's new decals would certainly be flashy! More progress. Some more conversion kit fun here. The exhaust nozzles don't fit very well, given that the whole geometry of the rear is changed from the kit. I had to do some surgery on the kit nozzles to get them to fit and look OK. A bit of a pain, and the nozzles need to be painted more of a gunmetal colour on the outside, but at least they fit onto the rear fuselage now. ALF Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ALF18 Posted March 3, 2012 Author Share Posted March 3, 2012 While waiting for the decals to be ready, I worked a bit on the seat and canopy mechanism. It is really fragile on the real aircraft, and of course is hard to get right on this kit. Patience is called for. One half needs to be glued in place and allowed to fully set, then a clamp is needed on the other half. And now for fun with decaling (sarcasm on here). I gotta say, home-made decals are a real adventure. We printed some on clear backing, and some on white. My friend's printer is an ink jet, and when I applied the decal film to seal them, I managed to destroy a couple. Here is what the tail flash looks like on clear paper. When I applied it on the dark camo tail, it was almost invisible. Groan. The white-backed ones looked terrible, and we had run out of decal paper. So I decided to use the silver pen to make a natural metal background to the tail flash and the formation light. It's just splooged on, and will need some brush touch-ups after the decal is applied. The clear backed decals for the wing lines and roundels are OK, but of course the roundels are a bit overwhelmed by the background camo colour. Sigh. Not perfect, but not a total disaster either. This bird will not be winning any contests, but I will be happy to have it on my shelf. Here's what the tail flashes look like. ALF Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ALF18 Posted March 3, 2012 Author Share Posted March 3, 2012 (edited) This one will definitely be a "stand back to fully appreciate it" kind of build! Now I know what ageing actors feel like when told they will be in HD for their new TV series - all the faults come and stare you in the face. After this build, I will definitely need an OOB kit or 3 before attempting anything at all this ambitious again. So I made more background for the impossibly transparent and pale white-backed formation light decals. Here's what one looks like when it's applied. Now I need to get out my very fine paint brush, and make the fine division lines between the 3 parallel rows of lights around the tip-tank... Stay tuned this weekend for more. ALF Edited March 3, 2012 by ALFster18 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ALF18 Posted March 5, 2012 Author Share Posted March 5, 2012 Decaling is taking a lot of time, and I need to do some paint touchups. Definitely not the most stellar-looking model. Here is a close-up of the home-made formation light, and a Belcher Bits ejection seat decal. The tail decals are very transparent (home made). I need to touch up the paint around them. A more general view. Look at the tip tank formation lights; I have done a (shaky) hand-painting job on them to approximate the real shape. Not easy to do! ALF Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ALF18 Posted March 6, 2012 Author Share Posted March 6, 2012 I've done some work in prettying up the decals,especially the formation lights. Some of the retouches have been done. I've also glued the "Station 85" fuel tanks in place (we called them station 85s because the inboard wing stations are 85 inches from the centreline of the aircraft). Then I worked on the canopy. First, painting of the camo on the clear parts. Then, glueing the main canopy in place on top of the seat. It's a whole lot easier to glue the canopy in place like this than it is to hold it in place after the seat is installed. I did more touching up around the formation lights, including the separations of the different segments. Not easy to do by hand. I also changed the colour of the tail pipes. I used the Tamiya colour in the pic; it is a better representation of the actual nozzle colour. Next step is to apply the dull coat, and final assembly. ALF Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ALF18 Posted March 9, 2012 Author Share Posted March 9, 2012 Ever build one of those kits that frustrated you to the point of wanting to toss it in the garbage? Well, dear reader, this conversion was one of those builds. It's a miracle that it is tolerable to look at from 3 feet away. Not one of my best efforts, but after all the investment in time and money, not to say personal attachment to the subject, I have to call this one done and move on to something easier. First of all, a word to the wise. The Belcher Bits conversion for the CF-5A is viable, but definitely calls for exceptional modeling skills to pull off. I don't call mine exceptional; it is my best effort, and clearly fatigue and frustration played a part in the result. The resin was a real challenge, what with all the fitting, sanding, carving, and reinforcement with small holes and chopped-up finishing nails to use as pins. Add to that the first experience with home-made decals, and stand back - she's gonna blow! This one will still go on my office shelf, for one reason. I love the CF-5A. My first F-5 solo was in this one, 116710, on the 17th of December 1985. I remember walking around this single-seat pointy machine in the frosty winter afternoon sun, marvelling at how I was going to be all alone in a supersonic jet for the first time. And it only had one seat! Definitely an experience to file away forever. Fast forward a couple years, to the summer of 1987, and I flew my last CF-5 sortie, again in this jet, configured as it is here. Two underwing tanks, tip tanks, and a single live Mk 82 high-drag bomb on the centreline. I flew as number 2 on a 2-plane ground attack sortie, with our target being the old tank at the Shaver River range in Cold Lake. My artificial horizon and compass (called the GHARS) failed to work on this flight; I hid the fact it was broken and flew on my standby compass in the pristine Northern Alberta sky that day. I figured lead would get me where I was going. If I had aborted, there was no spare, and the next day I had a flight booked to go on vacation (non-refundable) at the end of the course. This is what flight safety investigators call "press-on-itis"; luckily nothing went wrong. I flew the trip in a tactical line-abreast formation (1.5 nm away, same heading), and everything went fine until the live bomb attack. I had sort of forgotten two things: I had to follow 30 seconds behind lead at 100 feet above ground, with no compass, and the bomb sight was non-functional, given it needed the gyros to be stabilized and displayed. What I had was a red dot that was tracing rapid arcs on my bomb aiming glass, totally useless for aiming. The standby compass was bobbing around and not accurate to within 5 degrees, so I took my spacing behind lead and dropped down even lower than him (barely skimming the tops of the trees) at 480 knots. I kept him visual as a speck just above the horizon - the CF-5 is small! When he popped up to acquire the target visually and drop his bomb, I eased up about 50 feet higher above ground, and tried to find the ground features hidden in the muskeg that showed me where to pop myself. I saw nothing, so I did it strictly on timing. As I popped, I picked up the tank target and pulled hard down into it, calling "in hot" to the Range Safety Officer. He cleared me hot, and I rolled out on my 5 degree drop, diving from about 1,500 feet above ground to where I was to release at about 350 feet above ground. Dozens of simulated bomb runs helped me that day; I just kept flying down what looked like a 5 degree angle to me, and released when the bomb target got to the right spot near the end of the pitot boom. As I pulled up and looked back, I saw the huge flash and plume of dirt as the live bomb went off. Range Control called me to say I had dropped 100 feet short of the target. Not a great score, but fantastic for someone with no heading, attitude, or bomb aiming instruments at all. I bid farewell to the little fighter after that flight, and will always cherish those memories. So this one is going on my shelf, regardless of how poopy it may look in the harsh glare of high definition photography and flash. I won't let anyone close enough to see its flaws. Here it is: You can see the little bomb under the centreline. It's from the Academy Hornet kit. Our 6 lb Yorkshire Terrier cross lends some idea of size. For 1/32, it's not that big. Thanks for looking! I want to build more CF-5s, but will do it in 1/48 with the new Tan Models kit and some decent decals... ALF Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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