Italeri Tonado GR.4- completed

[chrish]

Greetings once again, pushing on with the stash reduction task, next up on the sacrificial block is Italeri's 1/32 Tornado

 

lots of ejector pin marks to clean up, before and after

 

Still cleaning up potholes

Thanks for looking

[Rockie Yarwood]

Cool! Following along!

[Treehugger]

I can recommend Vallejo's acrylic putty for filling in holes. To avoid the putty shrinking visibly, one just add putty into the cavity and then top the hole, as if making a soft-ice cream with the ice/putty sticking up. Then, when a little dry, one can slice the top off, and then after it dries some more, you can sand it flush. Quick and easy.

 

For holes that you think you might want to drill or cut into, then I like using sprue goo, turning it all into plastic. Drilling into putty isn't a good idea when the drill bit has to go through a mix of putty and plastic, or at least that is what it is like using a softer Vallejo putty.

 

I also like keeping some Tamiya sanding sponges around, cut into smaller pieces to get to sand smaller areas. 

 

Also, I would like to champion the use of the tool Trumpeter chisel tools. In addition to being able to cut off stubs and scrape flush plastic from above in tight spaces, you can also grind into plastic by scraping the plastic, which is very useful for quickly thinning plastic.

Example: https://www.scalemates.com/albums/img/1/5/2/1227152-28845-67-1440.jpg

Edited May 25, 2022 by Treehugger

[O.W]

On 5/25/2022 at 4:52 AM, chrish said:

Greetings once again, pushing on with the stash reduction task, next up on the sacrificial block is Italeri's 1/32 Tornado

 

lots of ejector pin marks to clean up, before and after

 

Still cleaning up potholes

Thanks for looking

Hi Chris,

 

I enjoyed building mine very mutch.

I'll be following your progres because I have another one in my stash

 

Cheers Otto

[chrish]

Thanks for the support.

I've taken a small detour, removed all the big airoplane parts from the trees, taped them together to check the fit. All is great but one small issue. The lower front section to the lower rear section has interlocking crenelations but the receivers in the rear part are too shallow, or the front extrusions are too long. During the test fit I found a gap nearly 2mm (around .040")

Here's an image of the front half with arrows pointing at where (the extrusions were) removed.

 

 

the front to rear join with those offending crenelations removed, it would be stronger gluing them but then I'd have a gap to fill

 

another view;

This may only be my kit (I doubt it) but I'd be interested to see if other builders had a gap here or how they dealt with the fit.

Thanks for looking

[chrish]

I took some time to build up the weapons stations and weapons. Not wanting to add the air to air missiles, I built the station and added spare P.E. left over from an previous build EA 18 G which didn't need the details. I simply glued the P.E. to the pylons to eliminate the flat smooth pylon mounting area. (I forgot to get pictures) and then began painting and gluing things together.

painted the engine "business end" with Alclad lacquers then went for a rusty look with Tamiya browns

  

 

 

Stainless steel and dark aluminum for the front

The office, in progress, more paint and some weathering will be added

and some of the finished assemblies. Once major assembly re-starts this should (could?) build up fairly quickly

Thank you for looking

[Stokey Pete]

Looking pretty darned good there. 

[chrish]

Still chugging away on the Tornado. So far, although with a bit of flash here and there, fit has been perfect. My resin seats from Sprue Brothers showed up yesterday saving me monkeying around with the brass P.E. seat details in the kit. The assembly manual (I don't read instructions) calls for a hefty nose weight, I super glued two 14 gram weights into a large nut then glued that to the rear of the station the mounts the radar

 

 

major assembly begins;

I forgot to get pictures of the gear bays under construction, they go together perfectly though.

Thanks for looking

[chrish]

The kit comes with a clever system of rods and gears to align the weapons stations with the direction of flight. I thought the pivot points were fairly loose, I decided to make some aluminum bushings to make the fit a little more snug. While the bushings I made will work great at tightening up the pivot points...and while I was patting myself on the back for my genius (Wiley Coyote) I found I'd lost both pivot point for the right wing. I searched for hours, cleaned out the garbage and looked everywhere I could imagine I may have put them. Nope, I had to knuckle down and make a couple of new ones from sheet and rod plastic, here's the result of all that.

here's the kit parts with the aluminum bushings ready for the left wing;

Aaannd my home made parts (made necessary because lose things and am an idiot)

Viewers may notice I also cut the slot for the pylon key on one of them on the wrong side first time around but am still using to part.

Thanks for looking 

[Stevepd]

You do know, now you’ve made those pivots you’ll find the originals.

[chrish]

No luck with finding the lost parts,I was sure they'd turn up as soon as I'd glued the wings together.

I've joined the front to rear fuselage halves and have the base coat of light gray on and a bit of dirt on the belly, not sure if this actual aircraft was this dirty as images show some airframes shiny clean and some filthy...so I went with a bit of filth.

 

Thanks for looking

[chrish]

added the thrust reversers, a bit of Eduard P.E. to the speed brakes left over from the Revell kit I built back in the 90's and the "fin". With a vertical stabilizer this big one could believe the thing could have been made by De Havilland Canada...

 

 

Thanks for looking

[Uncarina]

Go Chrish go! She’s looking fantastic.

 

Cheers,  Tom

[chrish]

Moving along, splashing paint on and adding dirt here and there...

 

 

work, such as it is, continues.

Thanks for looking

[LSP_Kevin]

Coming along nicely, Chris!

 

Kev