Tomcat launch dio 1/48 - DONE AFTER 4.5 YEARS!!!

[Kahunaminor]

Jim,

 

Sorry I am late to the party. I have seen this flow in and out of the pages and meant to catch up. I mainly build props but doesn't preclude me from the odd fast mover. Your skills in all aspects are well demonstrated. You have done an excellent job, Maverick would be proud!

 

Request permission for a flyby?

 

Well done and I look forward to the finished product.

[LSP_Kevin]

Superb work, Jim! I haven't checked in on this one for a while, but it continues to impress.

 

Kev

[Tomcat14]

Super work Jim, Really starting to look the part my friend.

 

Chris.

[ClumsyDude]

Jim,

Sorry I am late to the party. I have seen this flow in and out of the pages and meant to catch up. I mainly build props but doesn't preclude me from the odd fast mover. Your skills in all aspects are well demonstrated. You have done an excellent job, Maverick would be proud!

Request permission for a flyby?

Well done and I look forward to the finished product.

Permission for flyby? You bet Kent!

 

Superb work, Jim! I haven't checked in on this one for a while, but it continues to impress.

 

Kev

Thanks Kev!

 

Super work Jim, Really starting to look the part my friend.

 

Chris.

Thanks mate! Keen to see how it works weathered, I think that's the key ...

 

Cheers

Jim

[allthumbs]

Hi Jim,

 

Outstanding work! Like others here, I seldom surf the "non-LSP works" forum...but wow, I didn't know what I was missing.

 

I'll be watching from now on though

 

Rich

[andromeda673]

hell yeah 

[ClumsyDude]

Thanks Rich, that's very kind of you. It's funny, like you I stuck to the main board for a long time - even though I was working on a non-LSP project myself. Once I saw what was over here I realised it was just as impressive. There are a few threads on non-LSP that just blow my mind - it's hard to list them all without raking over the whole forum, but just wow.

 

Thanks for stopping by!

 

Cheers

Jim

[ClumsyDude]

Thanks guys, been "one of those weeks" at work so it gave me a real lift to see your comments.

 

Cheers

Jim

[Kahunaminor]

Sometimes a trip to the Dark Side is well worth the visit!

 

Regards,

[ClumsyDude]

Thanks Kent and Carnavalli ... appreciate you dropping by!

 

Jim

[ClumsyDude]

Thanks Harv, you're a true gentleman!

 

Ok, so time for another update. This one is the deck weathering ... this turned out to be one of the biggest soap operas in a soap opera laden build. I'm still not sure if I'm happy with it ... but you guys be the judge, let me know what you think.

 

You'll recall that I had my practice deck, and the idea was to apply all this to the big one.

 

 

I started with something like this. I say, "something like this," because this is actually after attempting to weather it twice and stripping back the weathering (I love lacquer paints because it's so easy to strip enamels off them).

 

 

First job is mixing the oil paints for the tyre marks. This mix is Winsor & Newton lamp black with some burnt sienna and mixing white.

 

 

This then gets thinned (a lot) with high quality turps, and I started to apply tyre marks all over the deck, using the vinyl tyre that came with the Hasegawa tomcat kit. Here's what it looks like over a small area.

 

 

And building up density, over a bigger area (I came to think of this as the "thorn bush" - it takes about half an hour to do the whole deck, which I did five times over, stripping it back in between).

 

 

Thorns everywhere:

 

 

Then I used a broad paint sample brush from the hardware store to brush gently over it with a very thin mix of browny-black oil paint, then went over it making more "negative" tyre marks with a cotton bud. The result looks like this.

 

 

I felt like this looked dreadful (it was the third attempt). Note the enormous smudges where oil paint has collected in the non-slip grooves in the deck. Yuck.

 

I tried to add some more tyre marks over the top, in the hope that this would make it look better. It looked worse.

 

 

So I stripped it back and did the thorns over for a fourth time.

 

Here's the result fourth time over. Better, and you can see the "negative" tyre marks to good effect.

 

 

But look how I added too much wash in the foreground, and washed out the tyre marks ...

 

[ClumsyDude]

So I stripped it back again. Of course, stripping it for a fourth time meant that I had started to rub some of the white paint off. So I had to re-mask the whole bloody thing and spray it all over. Herewith the result - note that I couldn't be arsed re-spraying the yellow and white border around the big hatch ... might park a tractor over it.

 

 

Here's most of the hundreds of yards of tape I used:

 

 

So, back to the thorns for a fifth time. This time I decided to add a bit of variety, with a bunch of darker ones.

 

 

Closeup ... note clumsy attempt to weather over my non-re-painted hatch markings ...

 

 

 

Here's what it looks like after the over-wash with the super thin black brown mix:

 

 

 

I was happy enough not to strip it back and go again .... some of the dark marks are maybe too dark but I'll live with it.

[LSP_Kevin]

That looks great, Jim! Very convincing.

 

Kev

[ClumsyDude]

From here it was on to the runway weathering. The dominant feature here is a bunch of tyre marks from planes landing on the runway. On the real thing they are all parallel, I guess for the reason that the pilots generally come in within a degree or two of the runway angle. My freehand efforts were pretty ordinary - not parallel at all.

 

So, Mrs ClumsyDude generously (if unwittingly) donated an oven rack that had about the right number of parallel bars to act as a guide.

 

 

Half an hour later ... note that I have also gone over the landing marks with the thin wash, to soften them a bit.

 

 

 

I then used an old toothbrush to spatter some dark mix around the catapult, per reference photos:

 

 

And here's the overall, now unmasked:

 

 

 

 

Thanks for following along! I'm not super happy with it (the transition between the landing marks on the runway and the unmarked non-runway area looks too stark, and some of the darker marks look odd), but I'll be stuffed if I'm stripping it back and doing it over a sixth time.

 

Have a good weekend all.

 

Cheers

Jim

[ClumsyDude]

That looks great, Jim! Very convincing.

 

Kev

Thanks Kev! Glad you like it. It was a lot of fun (even with all the rework) ...

 

Cheers

Jim