Italeri CF-104 Starfighter "Kicked up a Notch": KLP Publishing eBook now Available!

[chuck540z3]

On 12/23/2020 at 7:06 AM, Oldbaldguy said:

Okay, wait.  What?  You painted the seat cushions dark gray?  Then how did they end up that indeterminate mousey gray/brown color so common to seats after a lot of use?  I’ve yet to capture that after all these years.

 

Thanks.  After painting the seats gray, I gave them a wash of The Detailer in Brown, then wiped it off.  What I really like about this water based wash is that you can easily remove and rearrange staining with plain water, even after it has dried for a long time.

 

 

December 26/20

 

 

Thanks for all the words of encouragement and tips guys!

 

Picking up where I left off, Jari (Finn) showed the pic below of a Canadian CF-104 seat with the candy cane striped side arms for the webbing at the back.  When I first saw this I was not happy, because:

 

1.      The red and white doesn’t go with anything.  If it was yellow and black it might look OK, but this is just ugly.

2.      I suck at brush painting.  The side arms have deep U-shaped surfaces on the top and bottom, so masking these off properly for spraying is almost impossible.

 

I was torn until I saw Mike’s pic of the same thing above, although the ends of these arms are quite different from the first pic.

 

 

 

 

So I sucked it up and painted the arms white, followed by brush painting the red stripes.  Due to the up and down nature of the top of the arms, it looks a bit jagged, but not too unlike pics of the real deal.  I then dirtied them up a bit with black wash.

 

 

 

 

 

 

What you see on the sides is almost invisible with the seat parked into the cockpit, so all that really matters is what you can see from the top, which is thankfully not much.

 

 

 

 

 

As pointed out to me earlier, another Canuck variation is the glareshield that is covered with a green khaki canvas, does not have the notch in the middle, doesn’t have the ability to extend the shield rearward and is very thin.  Here’s a few pics of what it looks like.

 

 

 

 

Note that is has loose threads everywhere.

 

 

 

 

And here is the kit part on the left and the BB resin version on the right

 

 

 

 

So I sanded down the top detail, filled the notch with styrene and scribed detail that sort of matched the stitching at the front of the shield.  I then covered the shield with Future/Pledge with a paint brush.

 

 

 

 

And then I did something I’ve never done before:  I covered the shield with a microcloth while the Future was still wet.  The goal here was to create a rougher finish like canvas and maybe add a few small fibers.  If you pull off the cloth too so, not much will happen.  If you let the Future dry too much, getting the cloth off will be hard and likely leave a lot more than you bargained for.

 

 

 

 

After painting, not bad.  This is the first time in my life I actually wanted a bit of crap on my paint finish!  Note that I added the kit HUD, which isn’t very accurate.  The lens should be near the top and tilted rearward like the BB resin part, while there should be canvas seams here and there towards the front.  With all this stuck under the windscreen, I didn’t think the effort to modify this shield even further was worth it.

 

 

 

 

 

Side panels were painted an weathered, where I added placards and handles according to references.  That big yellow handle is for the canopy lock, that swings down and rearward against the black stop behind it.  The small handle below it is for fresh air.

 

 

 

 

 

The instrument panels were next, where I used Airscale decals and a few brass bezels, since the upper IP is quite different on CF-104’s than most F-104’s, with the artificial horizon prominently displayed top and center.  As shown earlier, the upper IP is a modified kit part while the bottom is the BB resin version which is close.  Ignore the lettering, which can’t be seen with the naked eye, other than something is written there.  More on Airscale later.

 

 

 

 

Now a bit of a walkaround, with everything parked inside the tub.  Very tight and very busy!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And reinstalled into the front fuselage.  With lots and lots of dry fitting earlier, everything slides into place now with no drama.

 

 

 

 

As mentioned, when the windscreen is painted and installed, the deficiencies of the glareshield will almost disappear. 

 

 

 

 

Even though they are a ton of work, my cockpits are getting to be quite routine for me now, partly due to practice and partly because I have all the instruments and placards I could ever need.  Some are from WWII, some modern jets, some Soviet and some are even Luftwaffe.  All I do is check my references, then hunt for the perfect decal and/or bezel that looks close.  At these tiny scales, you will never notice if the decal says “Danger” or “Achtung!” 

 

 

 

 

 

So how did I get such a wide selection of these Airscale products?  Four years ago, when I was having trouble finding the right decals for my P-38L cockpit, somebody suggested using Airscale.  I had never heard of them before, although many vouched for their quality.  Out of the blue, “Mr. Airscale” Peter Castle contacted me and wanted my home address.  A few weeks later, in the mail came the motherload of many of the decal and brass sheets you see above.  Wow!  I have been ever grateful to Peter since, so here’s a well-deserved plug for these products.  The decals are extremely fine detailed and unlike many small decals, they behave with decal solutions and they are tough.  You can shove them around for quite a few minutes, even with Microsol on them, before they stick permanently.  The PE bezels and other brass details are also perfectly registered and very easy to cut off the frets.  My favorite decals sheets are AS32 DAN, “1/32 Modern Jet Cockpit Labels and Warnings” and AS32 HAC, “1/32 Modern Cockpit Instruments, where I found just about every decal I needed for this model.  What is really nice to have is the black and yellow warning sheets that you can cut to size, creating the finely striped detail you see in my cockpit above.  If you ever want cockpit decals, buy them at the link below!  They are that good- and thanks again to Peter for coming to my aid.

 

 Airscale Products

 

Cheers,

Chuck

Edited December 27, 2020 by chuck540z3

[Michael931080]

Beautiful Cockpit Chuck!

[aircommando130]

Awesome work! Gonna have to start chewing Beeman's gum to follow along!

 

Cheers...Ron

[MikeA]

The finish on the glare shield and canvas in front of it looks great! Never thought of doing anything like that - something to be kept in mind.

 

Cheers,

[jgrease]

As always, great work and lots to learn from it! Keep it up!

 

John

[AlbertD]

You have done a great job making the cramped cockpit look look amazingly realistic. Your pictures look really good too. Way better then my lousy cell phone pictures.

[MikeMaben]

Dear Mr. Airscale , my address is 1732 ....  worth a try ?   

[airscale]

quite sublime work as usual Chuck - you make what I always thought would be a useful addition to a modellers arsenal look better than I had ever envisaged

 

Thank you too for the shout-out

 

3 hours ago, MikeMaben said:

Dear Mr. Airscale , my address is 1732 ....  worth a try ?   

 

 

LOL - worth a try

 

I sent Chuck some stuff as I just loved watching what he was doing and I like giving something back through the forum - I still do it today

 

Great 'pit Chuck - you can be rightfully proud of it and I just know this is going to be your best build yet

 

Peter

[chuck540z3]

3 hours ago, airscale said:

quite sublime work as usual Chuck - you make what I always thought would be a useful addition to a modellers arsenal look better than I had ever envisaged

 

Thank you too for the shout-out

 

LOL - worth a try

 

I sent Chuck some stuff as I just loved watching what he was doing and I like giving something back through the forum - I still do it today

 

Great 'pit Chuck - you can be rightfully proud of it and I just know this is going to be your best build yet

 

Peter

 

 

Thanks again Peter! 

 

I should have mentioned that I'm not a total sponge and have bought a few of Peter's sets on my own, especially the 1/32 Modern Jets sheets.  The kit has a few instrument decals but they are fairly crude and in two bigger sheets, so unless you want to risk decal film, every gauge must be carefully cut out.  The Airscale decals are way easier to use and as mentioned, have 2-3X the detail.

 

Another thing that I mention from time to time is that my pics are typically quite close and I sometimes don't appreciate just how close they are.  I do this so that I can show all of the fine detail that you might not see from a distance.  Not to make excuses- and I know I am- but many of the small flaws I can see in my pics above I just cannot see with my close-up glasses, so it's nearly impossible to do so.  Here's a pic from about 6" away which would be more typical when looking at a completed model.

 

 

 

Cheers,

Chuck

Edited December 27, 2020 by chuck540z3

[Uncarina]

Chuck, brilliant work, and that cockpit could be a stand alone display that would make a museum happy to have! Any chance you could post a few pics of it in the LSP Cockpits thread so more people could see it? Although I strongly suspect the entire forum community follows your builds anyway!

 

Cheers,  Tom

[chuck540z3]

19 minutes ago, Uncarina said:

Chuck, brilliant work, and that cockpit could be a stand alone display that would make a museum happy to have! Any chance you could post a few pics of it in the LSP Cockpits thread so more people could see it? Although I strongly suspect the entire forum community follows your builds anyway!

 

Cheers,  Tom

 

Thanks!

 

I just updated your thread with a few pics of this 'pit and my recent Tempest build.

 

Cheers,

Chuck

[aircommando130]

When I was a little guy and my dad was stationed at Edwards he's take me with him to the hanger on a Saturday if he needed to do something in his office. He'd tell me to watch for rattlesnakes and "don't touch anything" while I was loose in the hanger with F-104's and F-100's. I'd climb up boarding ladders and just look at the switches

and instruments and the colors in the cockpits. And breath that electrical/sweat smell that airplanes have. Brings back memories Chuck! 

I'm surprised nobody has done a conversion yet to make the "G" model into a NF-104A Aerospace Trainer that was at Edwards. 

 

Cheers...Ron

[Uncarina]

1 hour ago, chuck540z3 said:

 

Thanks!

 

I just updated your thread with a few pics of this 'pit and my recent Tempest build.

 

Cheers,

Chuck

Thanks Chuck!

 

Cheers,  Tom

[ScoobyDoo]

On 12/5/2020 at 7:33 PM, chuck540z3 said:

 

Exactly, although I'm not so sure about the magic part.   

 

Had these decal rivets not worked, at least for me, it would have been many hours of adding sunken rivets right now while I'm currently cleaning up the fuselage halves.  Lots of issues there, which I will soon show.  Now it's many hours of adding slightly raised rivets much later in the build after some paint. I know, some of you out there still think raised rivets are stupid on this particular jet.  Keep in mind that my pics above are SUPER close.  To my naked eye, I can't see that the rivets are raised at all, which is exactly what they should look like.

 

Cheers,

Chuck

Chuck, great to see you doing a CF-104, I loved the jet.

 

By 1979 your jet would have had a gun, as Jari pointed out.

 

In regards to the wing dilemma, Hasegawa Tri-tool makes a donut ring stamper. I love it, it actually stamps a ring. I can get you the part number if needed.

[ScoobyDoo]

On 12/6/2020 at 2:34 PM, aircommando130 said:

I remember the 104 had sharp leading edges...had covers that went over them so you wouldn't lose an ear! 

 

Cheers...Ron

I know a few people who were scalped working on them.