Tamiya F-16 Aggressor, Kicked Up a Notch, April 11/24: Lighting Details

[chuck540z3]

Thanks Guys!

 

March 3/24

 

Well, I’m back already, mostly because I didn’t really go anywhere.  To make a very long and painful story short, I experienced an intestinal blockage almost a month ago and spent 4 days in the hospital.  When we left for our big trip I was feeling OK, but on the first leg of our flight all of the symptoms of a blockage came back, so we had to cancel the 16 hour flight to New Zealand and the 6 week cruise we had planned for 2 years to celebrate my new retirement.  Huge bummer, but there are much worse things that could have happened I know, so my wife and I have re-booked a similar trip in a year and we soldier on.

 

After a week of feeling sorry for myself and moping around, I finally picked up this model and got after the Aires main landing gear bay.  Modeling is great therapy when you want to forget about things and I soon became totally engrossed in painting all the tiny details.  This was fairly difficult to do, because I suck at brush painting and with all the tiny details hard to get at, it took a long time with lots of mistakes.  After fixing most of them, here is where I am today.

 

 

With the gear bay already cemented into the lower fuselage, I found it easier to handle than it might be otherwise.  I tried to replicate many reference pics I found on the ‘net, and some great detailed pics in Jake’s Modern Viper Guide.  The Aires resin is super detailed already, but I did add a few hoses and pipes here and there into holes I had pre-drilled earlier before paint.  The 3 holes on either side at the top will be used for the hydraulic lines that will go into the gear doors when they are attached.

 

 

The battery frame isn’t accurate for modern Vipers, but it looks so nicely detailed I retained it, partly because the kit has the perfect yellow decals that fit perfectly around the frame.  I also added some decals to that silver Halon bottle to match a few pics, although the red band should be a bit darker. The central wall looks a bit rough because I had to sand it down, but it will eventually be covered by Part C27.

 

 

Some of the hoses are only dry fit for now, because they will be in the way when I install the main landing gear.

 

 

 

I can’t vouch for the accuracy of some of my plumbing, but I think it looks pretty close and makes the gear bay look a bit more busy.  As always with these close-up pics, you can see a lot more mistakes than you can with your bare eyes!

 

 

With the Aires cockpit and main gear bay now painted and detailed, the most difficult part of this build is now complete.  Next steps will be to detail the front gear bay and landing gear.  Thanks for looking in.

 

Cheers,

Chuck

Edited March 3 by chuck540z3

[Brett M]

Sorry to hear about the trip not happening, but glad you and your wife can rebook and go for round 2! Sounds like quite the trip you've planned.

 

Landing gear bay is looking sharp, Chuck. As always, looking forward to more.....maybe I should work on my Aires gear bays for my -105G  

[Troy Molitor]

Dropping in here Chuck.  I usually don't look into the jet builds unless they're a complete scratch build.  Just not my favorites.  However, always an exception to my own rules.   I peeped in and had a look.  Wow, this is shaping up nicely for you.  I'll give it a thumbs up for sure.  Mighty impressive.

 

Kind regards,

Troy 

[geedubelyer]

Sorry to hear your trip was postponed Chuck but glad you're ok now. 

 

Nice job on the gear bays 

[chukw]

Glad you're okay, Chuck! Bummer about the trip, but at least you're still retired. The bay looks great, and I've found that a toothpick can be a great paint applicator to tiny details and things in tight spaces, but I'm willing to bet you already know that. 

[chuck540z3]

Thanks guys.  I'm not really looking for sympathy other than understanding why I'm still around.  We all have friends and relatives with life threatening situations that make my situation a tiny bump in the road, so I still feel very lucky.  Having said that, you have to take intestinal blockages very seriously, because in certain situations they can kill you.

 

1 hour ago, chukw said:

The bay looks great, and I've found that a toothpick can be a great paint applicator to tiny details and things in tight spaces, but I'm willing to bet you already know that. 

 

Thanks and I do!- but I have a twist on that idea that works even better:  A small plastic microbrush with the head pulled off.  With the tapered end that they all have, you can cut the "paintbrush" to whatever thickness you want.  I used this method to paint the tiny switches on the cockpit.

 

Cheers,

Chuck

[LSP_Kevin]

Glad to hear you're OK, Chuck! And sorry that you had to cancel your trip. Better luck for the next one!

 

Model is looking great by the way.

 

Kev

[chaos07]

Loving the progress Chuck!

 

Glad to see a positive turn in an otherwise unpleasant situation.  

[scvrobeson]

Sorry about the trip, but I'm happy that you're still working on the Viper with your usual high standard of work

 

 

 

Matt 

[Zola25]

Sorry to hear about your trip Chuck 

 

If this is you "sucking at brush paiting" I don´t think you have too much to worry about 

 

Great photos as always

 

/Niels

[Stokey Pete]

Exemplary as always Chuck. Your detail finishing is awesome. 
Speedy recovery wishes n all that. 

[Memphis]

The wheel bay looks very well! I would be happy if I could have the same view with my 72 scale kit.

 

I'm sorry that your trip didn't take place. And when my youngest daughter went to the hospital (with my wife) two years ago, I couldn't find a place for me. During waiting news from the hospital I decided to do something. I didn't remember what it was, but it was mechanical work with detals one of my kits. This helps. I wish you speedily recovery.

[chuck540z3]

March 6/24

 

A little more progress on the Main Landing Gear (MLG).  The last time I played around with fitting the MLG and other aftermarket parts to the kit parts was way back in December/22, so if you want to see how I got to this stage before paint, there’s quite a bit there which is roughly on Page 4. 

 

I hate metal landing gear of any kind, because it’s usually rough to begin with, you can’t screw holes into it for wiring and plumbing and paint doesn’t stick to it very well, making masking a risky procedure.  On a few of my prior builds I used Mr. Metal Primer-R as a base with mixed results.  It was better than no special primer, but not by much.  Something that seems to work a bit better for me is to use ordinary Tamiya X-22 instead.  It’s not perfect either, but I find it better than the other stuff and it’s a lot cheaper.

 

 

Here are the results of lots of picky, picky work which is quite frankly on the top end of my abilities.  I’m not sure if it’s my declining dexterity and eyesight, or I just don’t give a crap about some details that you’ll rarely see anymore.   In any case, despite my struggles, I’m generally happy with the end result.  Here’s some pics with labels of the highlights:

 

 

Wheels are only dry fit and I will likely add a few more lines from the wheel to the leg when they are cemented in.

 

 

I used ANYZ line connectors (AN016) to hold the wires, which required drilling them out using a #80 drill bit.  My success in doing so was only about 1 in 3, so I used a lot of them! 

 

 

For reference pics I used mostly Jake’s Viper Guide and a few pics I’ve taken over the years at Nellis AFB.  There are two main white hydraulic lines that go along the top of the main leg and one black electrical one that goes halfway down on the back.  For some reason the hydraulic lines cross halfway down the leg.  I used a thin wash to dirty up the MLG a bit to make them a bit more realistic and also hide the odd boo-boo.   Scuffed paint is usually due to dry fitting in the gear well, which you won't see later.

 

 

Here’s how everything now looks parked into the very crowded MLG Bay.  I’m fairly proud of this assembly I’ve created, because now everything fits fairly well and can easily be cemented in at the very end of the build.  As a matter of fact, the MLG just slides into place with a firm click and I won’t need any glue at all.

 

 

A look from the rear showing that prominent black line. 

 

 

All of the new wires tuck into the middle of the MLG where they belong.

 

 

Even the landing gear doors are now plug and play and just slide into place.  Remember those 3 holes I drilled earlier?  They hold 3 hydraulic lines that loop into the top of the main door actuator at the front.  Although they don’t connect to the actuator in this exact way, it’s all I could do with such a fine detail at 1/32 scale.  BTW, they are usually dark blue, so I used dark blue wire I had on hand.  I'm leaving the doors clean for now, because I'll be painting the outside of them blue later, so I don't want masking tape to remove anything.

 

 

When the gear doors are open, they hang down a bit and are exposed.  I also added 2 small wires to the front control arms.

 

I’m calling this MLG Bay Done!  On to the front gear bay, which is much simpler, but still has a few things you need to be careful of.

 

Cheers,

Chuck

 

Edited March 7 by chuck540z3

[chaos07]

Meticulous work as always Chuck.  Those Anyz line connectors look awesome.  

I found the resin to be brittle when drilling the electrical connectors and in person - man are they small.  The photos we see certainly make them look much easier to handle, but once a flow is found they add so much.   
 

enjoying another master build!

[chuck540z3]

March 14/24

 

This build marches on with quite a few updates.  With the main landing gear bay pretty much finished, it was time to finish the front landing gear bay.  While a lot smaller with less parts, there are still some important things you need to do in order to get the Aires resin to fit properly.  Here’s a few pics of where I was about a year ago.  The surface detail on the bottom of the intake needs to be sanded down, but so does the top of the resin part.

 

The Aires resin doesn’t have a notch for the gear leg to fit into, which tilts it slightly forward like the kit parts.

 

The fix is to cut a small notch and glue in a styrene block for the front paddle to slide into.  The bottom of the metal leg or the diagonal struts need to be trimmed as well.

 

This provides the correct angle and the ability to remove the gear leg until final assembly, much as I did with the main landing gear.

 

Although the Aires “instructions” don’t mention it (no big surprise there), the actuator and control arms Part F2 and F3 must be trimmed and cut as shown.

 

 

 

After painting and assembly with the other intake parts in Step 8, here’s how it looks with a little bit of grime added for contrast.

 

 

Here’s how F2 and F3 should fit the resin gear bay.

 

 

Much like the main landing gear, there are a lot of hydraulic and electrical lines that are attached to the front gear leg.  I only added the front 2 hydraulic lines, because they are the most visible from the front.  Again, I used blue lines like pics I have of the real deal.

 

 

Before gluing the front intake assembly to the rear intake assembly above the main landing gear bay, I painted and glued the front fan Parts P1 and P24 to the rear of kit part B31, because it doesn’t fit the Aires resin at all.  As shown earlier, I had to trim down the Aires resin quite a bit in order for this fan to fit at all.

 

 

Here is the front intake glued to the rear intake and rear air duct.  The big air duct ring Part C34 is not used or needed, but to close up the sides of the rear intake, I used strips of white styrene to close the gap and make it less obvious.  You can’t really see this gap from the front unless you use a flashlight and peek inside, so I took the easy route for once and focused on what you can actually see, instead of trying to make this deep assembly seamless.

 

 

On the bottom, I needed to sand down the central rib of the Aires gear bay a bit more……

 

 

…. so that Part C27 is a drop-in fit at the end of the build, after I install the main landing gear and other bits.  This part was a bit too short for some reason, so I added a white styrene spacer to make it fit better.  Aires supplies a resin replacement, but it's even shorter, so I don't know why they bothered.

 

 

I finally got the Aires cockpit to fit the upper fuselage pretty good, so a revisit of what is involved is shown again below.  The back of the kit cockpit wall needs to be cut out, which was a bit crude on my part, so I filled in my mistakes with CA glue and sanded them smooth.

 

 

The fit is much better now.

 

 

The front area around the coaming/glare shield is another matter, because the Aires parts don’t fit the kit parts at all.  To be fair, not even the kit parts fit very well, which leave a very noticeable gap at the front that must somehow be filled.  This is a shame, because on the F-16, there is no front windshield to hide all these flaws, so many modifications to this area need to be made if you want something that looks close to accurate.

 

 

I closed the gap at the front with some strip styrene, but the sides are still a bit of a mess.

 

 

More strip styrene to the rescue, among other tweaks here and there.

 

 

Here is the end result after painting from a variety of angles.

 

 

 

The black areas are not “weathered” yet, because I want to mask all of this off for painting, and weathering agents like pastels will reduce the adhesion of the tape.

 

 

Even the back area looks pretty good, at least to my eyes.

 

 

So how did I fill all those gaps without making a big mess with putty and paint?  I finally gave a bottle of black CA glue a try, but it was very risky.  I thought that if I applied the glue from the back, it would ooze into the gaps to close them and already be “painted” black, while gluing the cockpit into place solidly.  What really made this work was the viscosity of the glue I had on hand, pictured below.  It was a bit thick, maybe a touch more than medium viscosity, which allowed me to apply it with a micro-brush from below, working it into the gaps one small segment at a time, then flipping the fuselage over so that gravity wouldn’t let the glue move down too far.  After it dried a bit and became relatively solid, maybe 3-4 minutes, I flipped it over and applied more glue to the gaps on either side in a sequential fashion, never letting wet glue move to the surface of the cockpit for very long- maybe less than 5 seconds.  If this glue was super thin like the CA glues I usually use, it would have made a big mess and ruined everything.  If it was too thick, it wouldn’t have filled the gaps very well and would have been lumpy when it dried.  For once one of my little experiments worked, and I will always glue resin cockpits this way from now on.

 

 

 

 

Since I’m using the Thunderbirds kit which is primarily a Block 32, it doesn’t come with a gun like the Block 50 kit.  It even has a plug, Part Q5, which is supposed to be painted white.  Since all Viper Aggressors have a gun and are battle ready, I just painted the inside of the gun area flat black, so that all you can see is something dark and maybe not notice the lack of gun barrels.

 

 

Gun panels glued into place, since they will never come off.

 

 

This kit calls for a side vent, Part C4 in Step 19, like this Block 32 Ghost scheme Viper, 86-299. All pics are mine at Nellis AFB.

 

 

My subject, however, is 84-220, a Block 25 Viper with no vent on this side, amongst other small differences.  I’m not really sure, but it looks like the rear window is clear and not tinted?  Tinting variability of Viper canopy glass is all over the place and there are few hard and fast rules, which is why the kit comes with both clear and tinted glass parts.  Still, I'd rather make my subject as "correct" as possible, so does anybody have a good pic of what this rear glass should look like?  The front canopy is tinted for sure.

 

 

As a result, I’m not drilling a hole or installing the vent as instructed.

 

 

When I get to the rear vertical stabilizer, I won’t be added any vents either, as Pete Fleischmann so kindly guided me way back in December 2022, a few months after I started this build.

 

86-299 again (Block 32)

 

 

84-220 (Block 25)

 

 

 

So that’s about it for now.  With all the heavy lifting over, the rest of this build should go fairly smoothly from now on, right?  Famous Last Words for sure!

 

Cheers,

Chuck

Edited March 16 by chuck540z3