dsahling1 Posted August 1, 2020 Author Share Posted August 1, 2020 Greetings fellas, today I'm going to talk about the Zactoman intakes. To make an accurate Su-27 you really do need the Zactoman intakes, even after Trumpeter "updated" their kit parts they still didn't get it quite right. I forgot to take more photos of the Zactoman pieces while I was working with the, but if you've removed one resin casting block you removed them all, nothing too fancy to show, so I moved on to the construction. Below is a photo of most of the tools I use for sanding/filing with tasks like the intakes. After you've removed the casting blocks and have cleaned up an dry fitted the parts its time to mask of the interior. Its much easier to do this before they've been attached to the fuselage, its also a good idea to prime and paint the upper portion of the front of the intake in AKAN Flanker light blue FS 35550 in the little "crawl space" between the fuselage and intake. I'm doing mine with the steel grate covers up so no need to paint most of the interior, just the parts sticking out. The interior intake color is tricky and seems to vary from jet to jet, block to block? its usually either a gray or metallic-grey/metallic yellow-gold, I can't quite recall what color I went with but I think it was Tamiya Ocean Grey or Neutral Grey?. Now you're ready to attach all the parts of the intake together, you just need to be mindful to either not paint, mask off, or use a q-tip soaked in lacquer thinner to remove any overspray that may have adhered to the resin part that will have the CA glue/parts join on it. For those unfamiliar, resin parts will adhere very poorly even with CA glue if there is paint over them, especially a good solid coat for any major or structural joins, if its a really tiny fiddly part like a flight control stick it shouldn't be an issue but check anyways to play it safe. Next comes time to attach the assembled intake to the fuselage, this can be fairly tricky and you need to follow the Zactoman instructions about which kit parts need to be modified to make the intake fit depending on if you have the grates open or closed. Again dry fitting is key but even then you may have a gap here or there, step/mistmatch even if most of the part fits ok its probably not going to be a drop-in fit. Once the intakes have been attached to the fuselage its time to fill the gap, clean up/rescribe the detail. Easier said than done. Several months ago when I did this step, I thought since its underneath and I wouldn't see it much that I would just use Tamiya putty with several applications until it "hid" the gap for the most part. I did a few applications of the tamiya putty but never finished, but after setting that step aside for a while to do the riveting and other work I came back to it a few days ago, and just finished it today. What a bear! I looked at the gap closely and even with the putty the groove/gap was quite wide and didn't look too good so I carefully added CA glue with a tooth pick. applied accelerator and began to sand it. Apparently the CA glue interacted with the cured putty of several months and became ROCK hard, more so than with regular CA glue. Maybe the glue seeped into the "pores" of the more brittle putty and mixed with it creating a very hard join. What I thought was going to be about one hour's worth of work turned into about 8-10! Some of this is from carefully sanding and filing to preserve the detail that I deepened with one of my rivet punch tools. I like to mask off detail with tamiya tape that I need to preserve and take a photo of it before i start sanding so i know what i need to replace if i make a mistake. The silvering lining to the reaction of the CA glue and tamiya putty is that you can actually scribe the putty! Dont go hog wild as some parts are a little fragile still, particularly those that didn't get the CA glue or as much of it, but 97% i was able to scribe. After carefully sanding away the CA glue and putty and the little step that formed from having the tape in place when i used the accelerator and making sure the zactoman intakes were flush with the kit parts I applied some Demo tape. (I can't recommend anything better to help as a scribing guide). The Demo was carefully applied on the line separating the zactoman resin piece from the kit. Now time for a new tool. I was reading through one of Chuck Sawyers WIPs and he was talking about the various tool he uses for scribing; his favorite being the Trumpeter scriber. I decided to try something new and ordered one of the Trumpeter scribers. Now I'm usually a creature of habit and have been using my regular scriber that looks like a pen/pencil for years but its always been tricky on curves as significant as the engine nacelles. It took a few applications and a couple 'slips' (I see what he means about a fresh scriber being harder to control) I found out why he loves that thing so much, I found it easy to use even for when you have to "dig" a little with it. I will definitely be using that Trumpeter more in the future, and I imagine it will also be easier to use on regular styrene plastic and without that major curve of the nacelle. Lastly I cleaned up and added the small amount of detail work that got sanded off despite protection, but it was relatively easy to re-scribe and fix so no big deal. These Flankers may be fighting me all the way to priming but patience is key, don't want to rush things. And they aren't even major challenges to fix (despite one riveting problem that was really dodgy on the painted one, where I had to go back over it after painting, but I'll talk more about that in either the next or one of the future updates when I talk about riveting) it just seems like any time I think I might have a break and that something will be easy it becomes time-consuming. 3 Speaking of the painted plane, I get a headache just thinking about all the rivet, detail, and correction/fix work I'm going to have to go back and do on that other plane. See before I decided how integral the rivets are to the weathered look of these Flankers, I went and did most of the camouflage work on the first plane, but now I'll have to go back and change/add all the new detail work I've done for the current two planes, fix/correct a small area on the windshield and IRST (again its not really difficult work, just time consuming and meticulous) and then touch-up and blend in the new airbrush work (luckily having these Su-27s be so weathered makes the touchups easier in some instances, but certainly not all). Although the technique I developed to help ensure uniformity with riveting will help make this easier as the placement of the rows has already been already researched and determined, its just drawing the connecting lines. But anyways, I'll talk all about the riveting next time. Until then enjoy! Dan Anthony in NZ, blackbetty, nicolas96 and 7 others 10 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brahman104 Posted August 1, 2020 Share Posted August 1, 2020 Hi Dan, While I'm not a huge fan of modern jets, I don't mind the flanker and I do love helicopters, so you've got my vote with with mi-8! Good luck with this project, I can only imagine how enormous this is going to be seeing as a flanker would have to be almost 3/4 of a B-17, let alone 3 in the mix! Cheers, Craig Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dsahling1 Posted August 10, 2020 Author Share Posted August 10, 2020 Just wanted to provide some updates on the progress of the project. I finished pretty much most of the basic riveting (first pass) for both of the current planes (the 3rd that already has paint on it will need to be 'updated' to reflect the current more-detailed planes). Now starts the meticulous task of punching out/deepening/defining ALL the rivets so that they show up and don't get covered with primer, paint, clear coats, etc. I'll upload some more photos of the other areas I re-riveted tomorrow or in the next couple days. First I make NO claim these rivet patterns are 100% accurate, but they're very close, I've studied countless reference photos for where the rivets are placed, so what you see is pretty much accurate, or as close as I could get it in some areas that were hard to work with. Evenly drawing lines over curved and uneven surfaces is very tricky, getting each row to line up in an uniform/identical pattern for other planes is also challenging but I created a trick, I'll talk more about next time basically just using masking tape that has a common/landmark reference and with a pencil to mark where each individual rivet row would go and connect them either with tamiya yellow tape or 1mm masking tape for curves. Then I draw the line with pencil so you can observe it to see if the rivet rows looks right or whatever you're after. The logic being you can always make changes with the pencil until its how you want it to look for your plane, once the plastic has been "cut" or in this case "riveted" you're pretty much set with what you've got (of course its doable to make corrections using CA glue but its annoying, slow, aggravating, etc). Then by simply using a common reference on the plastic, you can get each one to look almost identical to the others by having everything in place and line up like the others. I also re-did the gun panel, its not 100% accurate, but the overall look/impression matches, had to make some compromises with how I positioned the rivet rows. I'm still happy with it. However, the more I think about it, the most I realize this kit needs a LOT of work to make accurate combined with three of them....gulp....no rush! This is VERY time consuming, I'll keep posting photos of the other areas. And, I'm not finished with detailing, some detail still needs to be added in the way of drains, vents, antennas, panel lines, etc, using various scratch building techniques. I also modified the flaperons, even the really good builds here of the Su-27 usually miss this detail, the rivet pattern on the flaperons supplied by the kit are wrong, so is the hardware placements (I omitted/deleted these), in the real plane they also have an "open" area where the actuators are too I did that as well (again will be discussed in next update) so those will hopefully add some life to the builds you don't see much. Feels like a good time to stop, either tomorrow or the next few days i'll upload some more photos and show some more of the techniques, looking forward to getting some photo etch on them and getting them primed in the near future! Dan Harrison90, Dany Boy, blackbetty and 9 others 12 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spyrosjzmichos Posted August 10, 2020 Share Posted August 10, 2020 Great work Dan! The resin parts sure seem to improve the look of the Flanker. I would suggest you follow Chuck's method of applying a light wash on the rescribed panel lines to check if everything is fine. It really helps at such an early stage in construction. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dsahling1 Posted August 10, 2020 Author Share Posted August 10, 2020 5 hours ago, spyrosjzmichos said: Great work Dan! The resin parts sure seem to improve the look of the Flanker. I would suggest you follow Chuck's method of applying a light wash on the rescribed panel lines to check if everything is fine. It really helps at such an early stage in construction. I'll have to give that a shot, if I recall doesn't he just use the Tamiya panel line accent wash to highlight the rivets/panels/details? I actually ended up getting all of the rivets on just how I was hoping, sometimes the curved surfaces cause the rivet wheel tool to "slip" and it wasn't until the very end on the Zactoman nose, with the last rivet pass to go when it got away from me and luckily while the line was crooked it was only about an inch and I was able to fix it with CA glue, and is now straight but that was dodgy for a while and involved a lot of swearing. spyrosjzmichos 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spyrosjzmichos Posted August 11, 2020 Share Posted August 11, 2020 18 hours ago, dsahling1 said: I'll have to give that a shot, if I recall doesn't he just use the Tamiya panel line accent wash to highlight the rivets/panels/details? I actually ended up getting all of the rivets on just how I was hoping, sometimes the curved surfaces cause the rivet wheel tool to "slip" and it wasn't until the very end on the Zactoman nose, with the last rivet pass to go when it got away from me and luckily while the line was crooked it was only about an inch and I was able to fix it with CA glue, and is now straight but that was dodgy for a while and involved a lot of swearing. Yup, he uses Tamiya's panel line accent which I also find quite convenient for checks. It really saves a lot of time, especially down the line. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ROM Posted August 16, 2020 Share Posted August 16, 2020 Great job on that riveting Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Out2gtcha Posted August 16, 2020 Share Posted August 16, 2020 Excellent work! Inknow all about adding those corrected intakes, and they are definitely worth it. Model on! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
red Dog Posted August 16, 2020 Share Posted August 16, 2020 Very ambitious project. Huge and insane I love it. I wish you all the mojo necessary to pursue Happy modelling Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dsahling1 Posted August 16, 2020 Author Share Posted August 16, 2020 1 hour ago, red Dog said: Very ambitious project. Huge and insane I love it. I wish you all the mojo necessary to pursue Happy modelling Thanks for the encouragement, I've been working on this project for about a year and change with a couple breaks here and there. I find patience is one of the most important modeling skills to have, and I remind myself by not rush that I can get these to look really stellar in the end. Once the current 2 Su-27s I've been working on are primed I'm going to switch to an OOB project of a Tamiya 1/32 DeHavilland Mosquito Mk. VI. I need to get my airbrushing skills up to par again since its been a while since I've done some good solid airbrushing, and getting to add some "mottling" to make the paint job appear rather weathered and beaten up to reflect front-line service. It'll also go much quicker since those kits are so well-engineered as opposed to the Su-27s which can be made up to look really good with the right amount of work, but they still require a LOT of modification to get them that way. There's also a REALLY weathered A-6E Intruder project I might do simultaneously along with the Mossie....hmmmm, yes thats what I'll do! Cause the A-6E will be mostly OOB too with only resin intakes and ejection seats and some PE, so it should go together more efficiently and the engine compartments will be closed up, same with the avionics hatch, the wings will also be extended; thereby simplifying the construction phase, and that USN paint job will give me good practice for the weathering I'm going to do with the Su-27s. Then I'm going back to do the airbrushing for the Su-27s and bring the already mostly painted Flanker up to par with the other two (even though it'll require hardworking it'll be worth it in the end). I'm also excited to do the Mi-8 Hip helicopter as I recently discovered there's quite a lot of aftermarket for it to add lots of detail to the project, unfortunately I don't think there's a 1/35 Mi-8 resin/aftermarket cockpit or resin interior compartment, cause that could really add some 'life' to the diorama by having the crew, personnel, etc. load up the bird prior to a mission and put a whole bunch of "stuff" i.e. cargo, supplies, parts outside getting loaded up. Speaking of which, I know there's a 1/48th Russian weapons loading/cart kit by either trumpeter or kitty hawk available, but does anyone know of 1/32nd or 1/35th Russian missile loaders, trolley's, missile racks that are available? Dan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
red Dog Posted August 16, 2020 Share Posted August 16, 2020 The APA-5D was available as a conversion in 1/32 from HAD if I remember right but I have been looking for one for ages and came up dry I did saw this one day at a modelling contest, that's 1/32 Might provide some inspiration to you Daniel Leduc and dutik 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chuck540z3 Posted August 16, 2020 Share Posted August 16, 2020 On 8/1/2020 at 9:37 AM, dsahling1 said: Speaking of the painted plane, I get a headache just thinking about all the rivet, detail, and correction/fix work I'm going to have to go back and do on that other plane. See before I decided how integral the rivets are to the weathered look of these Flankers, I went and did most of the camouflage work on the first plane, but now I'll have to go back and change/add all the new detail work I've done for the current two planes, fix/correct a small area on the windshield and IRST (again its not really difficult work, just time consuming and meticulous) and then touch-up and blend in the new airbrush work (luckily having these Su-27s be so weathered makes the touchups easier in some instances, but certainly not all). Although the technique I developed to help ensure uniformity with riveting will help make this easier as the placement of the rows has already been already researched and determined, its just drawing the connecting lines. But anyways, I'll talk all about the riveting next time. Until then enjoy! Dan I still can't believe you are doing THREE of these jets, aftermarket and all, PLUS the diorama!? You are a very brave man Dan. I look forward to updates of this gargantuan project. Cheers, Chuck Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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