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Kittyhawk F-86D - Texas Air Guard


Zero77

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Hi,

 

When i move to my parents house for the hollydays, i often take a brand new kit with me to start unsprueing parts, making small subassemblies, filling ejector pin holes and so on. I usually only work on it for a few hours in the hollidays as i'm too busy outside, but this time i progressed quite nicelly !

 

So after about a week more, it's almost ready for painting. I did not detailled a lot the cockpit, which is pretty good OOB. I thought i could use the kit decals for the IP and consoles, but... no. It went really messy. So i stripped it all and restart painting it the old way. I will use some airscale instrument decals for the IP.

 

The fit of the kit is not perfect but it's quite good given the numerous parts inside and outside. There was a few strange moulding flaws, especially one just at the base of the windscreen on the left fuselage half (with excess of material). But nothing really serious.

 

Here are a few pictures of my Sabre Dog, i'll try to post other pictures of more details of the assembly later if there is some interest.

 

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Great start Nicolas!   Do I spy a WnW DH-2 in need of some love back there too? 

 

Agreed. MiG-21 too it would seem. The -D Sabre, though not one of my favorites, is still a good looking machine. I'll look forward to seeing what you do with it.

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I'm not Kevin Harv, but no problem, i will post pictures of the inside sub-assemblies. :)

 

And yes, there are a Mig-21 and a DH.2 begging for love. And a BAe Hawk, too (this one is waiting for some Archer rivets). They are on the list, but i will get back to them later.

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Thanks !

 

Here are a few inner details.

 

The intake. It needed some putty at the seam and to be touroughly sanded with some sanding paper rolled over a paintbrush handle. Many ejection pin marks to be filled and sanded too. I think my work is not perfect as the seam still can be noticed but it's ok for me. It's pretty dark and with the many reflects it's still quite difficult to see anything. I then "painted" it with Rub-n-buff applied with a cotton bud for 2 reasons : firstly it's quick and easy and it lays very smooth, whereas trying to spray some alclad or something in this kind of part would definitely result in the kind of dusty aspect, when the paint dries in the air and just looks like powder on the surface. And secondly rub-n-buff is one of the best stuff to get a highly polished finish. A real PITA for outside in my opinion, but for small parts like this, it's very useful.

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THen the exhaust, painted with AK metallic paints. I dont know if the parts are accurate, but t's pretty good from the box.

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And then inside the fuselage :

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The instrument panel decal i first wanted to use. But it was a bad idea :) .

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So i took the same decal from my F-86K, and punched the instruments that i then applied one by one. I then sprayed a flat coat and added a good drop of crystal clear on the instruments. They looks like glass real, but unfortunately there is no reflect on the picture.

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Just for fun, this is how i clamped the fuselage when i glued it... There are many parts so I had to do that to get the correct shape and avoid seams.

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Edited by Zero77
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The paint job is almost done now (i forgot to paint the wingtips...).

 

First i sprayed a coat of Mr Surfacer, to spot any flaw and also to fill the grainy surface of the model, then after correcting the numerous issues (scratches, wobbly rescribed panle lines and so on...) i started smoothing it with some 4000 grit micromesh.

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Then i applied some Alclad gloss black base and thouroughly polished the surface with micromesh 8000 and 12000 and finished with some kitchen towels.

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And i started spraying the metallic paint, a mix of AK Chrome and polished aluminium. I then resprayed some panel lines with other tints. Sorry i forgot to take pictures during the process, but after A LOT of masking (to paint the nose, the antiglare, the Aircraft grey underside, the exhaust area and Day-glo bands...), and many corrections to the metallic paint (damaged by my fingers...) i got this : 

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As i already heard a lot of bad things about Kittyhaw decals, I tried to use them on a scrap model, especially as the "TEXAS AIR GUARD" marking is pretty large, and i did well. It was just impossible to set it up straight without fold. So i decided to paint it. With the Silhouette Portrait it was very easy and took me about 15 minutes to get the masks.

I also painted the serial as it was wrong on the decal sheet (too small compared with the only ref i have, in the "Air Force Legend number 211").

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Now i still have to paint the wingtips, and i can start applying the decals. :)

Edited by Zero77
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Thanks for the kind words !

 

I'm always very impressed when I see sprayed NMF finishes and this is no exception. Great paint work, Nicolas.

 

Those masks you made with the Silhouette Portrait seem to work very well. How small can you go? Would it be possible to make masks for stencils?

 

Cheers

Rainer

 

It depends of the stencils ! If you're talking about tiny maintenance stencils, barely readable at 1/32, they would definitely be too small. But for larger kinds of markings, it may works. I was able to cut letters of about 3mm height on this F-86F tail, or the small red circles around the fuel caps on these wingtip tanks.

(the "US AIR FORCE" marking doesn't look very clean, but it's because of the surface painted in rub-n-buff, and paint adhesion is aweful, so when i unstuck the masks, some paint chipped).

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