Sukhoi Su-24M "Stormbringer UAF" [Trumpeter 1:48] - RFI

[Alex]

Wings installed and wing boots added and smoothed in.  For anyone who has this kit on their to-do list, look carefully at these parts (boots) before proceeding.  I ended up thinning them significantly (sanding the joining faces) at the front, and still probably should have done more, as the leading edges also needed blending post hoc.   With this done, the only "building" left for this one is ordnance.  Otherwise it's just painting now.

[scvrobeson]

Really looking forward to the paint on this one Alex. The digital schemes are always a great one.

 

 

 

Matt 

[Alex]

And with a coat of primer.  There are a few small flaws to fix but overall it doesn't look terrible at this stage.  I'm going to leave it sit until after my next lap of work travel so that I can (hopefully) have some consistent time available to work on the painting process once I'm back.

 

[Alex]

Back home and trying to move briskly through painting the fuselage.  The masking is trickier on curved surfaces, especially since this masking material that Foxbot uses is not as flexible as Oracal.  Same plan to start with the darkest color, cover it, next lighter color, etc.  Each stage is more involved since there's more area to mask plus the joins between adjacent masks to cover with tape.

 

 

 

 

Right after this shot I sprayed the third color in sequence, the light gray, so in the morning I can do the final round of masks and then spray the final off-white color.  Unlike the wings, which went almost perfectly, I'm quite sure that there will be plenty of touch-ups required once the layers of masks come off here.  

[Alex]

Here it is at the point of maximum mummification, with all the masks/tape on.

 

And then with the off-white sprayed.  The white does not cover super-well.  I'm going to end up having used almost an entire bottle of MRP in that color (401).

 

Having completed this process I now have an insight into a better way to do it (of course).  The challenge with the inside-out dark to light approach I took is that you have to start by placing a bunch of small masks in separate spots, but those masks have to nest inside other, larger masks that will go on later.  It's difficult to get them exactly positioned without the larger masks in place for reference.  So you end up with gaps.  Which are easy enough to cover with tape, but also result in the camo pattern being a little bit different than what the mask designer intended.

 

I did it this way in part because there are not complete masks provided to cover the lightest color - the off-white is "background" - i.e. the everything else that's left after you've done the other three colors.

 

What would be better (and I guess what I'll do if I do a UAF digital MiG-29, since the digital camo on the Frogfoot is much less complex than this one is) is to start by painting the whole airframe the second-lightest color (light gray), and then applying the light gray masks.  Then paint the medium gray inside those light gray masks as needed, and mask off, then the very small areas of dark gray, and cover those.  Then finally go back and spray the off-white.  I think that this sequence would make placing the masks a fair bit easier.

 

[Alex]

Here's a rough draft of the camo.  Wanted to get the masks off as quick as possible because some of them had been stuck down for 5+ days.  There are quite a few little bits to fix, but overall it's there or thereabouts.

 

[scvrobeson]

Looks great to see it all revealed Alex!  Congrats on getting through the camo process on this one. Could not have been easy 

 

 

 

Matt 

[Alex]

2 hours ago, scvrobeson said:

Looks great to see it all revealed Alex!  Congrats on getting through the camo process on this one. Could not have been easy 

 

 

 

Matt 

Thanks Matt!  It wasn’t terribly difficult to do, but time consuming for sure.  I didn’t keep track exactly, but I would guess that it took around 20 hours to get all of the basic paint layers down.  Fixing the errors, cleaning and smoothing the surface, and painting the radiotransparent gray sections will be at least another 5.

[LSP_Ray]

Looks good!

Sometimes it takes me 20 hours to get a single color scheme painted. 

[Uncarina]

That looks epic Alex!

 

Cheers,  Tom

[Alex]

8 hours ago, LSP_Ray said:

Looks good!

Sometimes it takes me 20 hours to get a single color scheme painted. 

 

7 hours ago, Uncarina said:

That looks epic Alex!

 

Cheers,  Tom

Thanks!  I appreciate y’all looking in on this as it creeps towards the finish line.

[ROM]

superb!

[Alex]

So after multiple rounds of this...

 

 

Fixing soft edges or little areas of paint pull-up, I feel like I'm at a point of diminishing returns with the camo scheme.  It's not perfect, but it's not going to get a ton better from here no matter how much time I put into it.  So I've called it good.  The next step was to paint the radome and other antenna-covering areas with radiotransparent gray.  From photos this hue is lighter than the darkest of the camo shades, but darker than the next-lighter one, so I did the obvious and did a ~60:40 mix of MRP 404 and 403 to do this.  Here are a couple of shots with that stuff painted and the tailplanes added (just dry fit; I will wait 'til later to fix them permanently).  I also did the anti-glare panel ahead of the cockpit with my favorite "scale black", RLM66.

 

 

 

Now there's just fiddly stuff to do.  There are little flexible covers that close off the area behind the wing boot that the wings slide back into as they sweep.  Trumpeter provides these as rubber castings.

 

 

That fortunately seem to take paint well.

 

 

I foresee it being a bit of a PITA to get these glued in cleanly, but it has to be done.  First, though, I'm finally going to go look at the ordnance situation...

Edited October 12, 2023 by Alex

[Alex]

Digging in to the Eduard 1/48 Storm Shadow resin kit, they are nice, definitely up to the usual Eduard standard.  One challenge is the back of the missile, since any resin casting has to have a pour block somewhere.  You saw them free and just have this:

 

Whereas on the back of the real thing an exhaust duct is present, with the rear turbine face visible farther in.  So to start I did the usual hole-drilling sequence, beginning with center-punching that back face.

 

Then stepping up through at least a dozen sequential sizes of drill bit until I had a 5mm recess in the back.

 

Eduard supplies these little trim rings to go around the exhaust

 

But that's all, so I'll need to work on a bit more detail, but I plan to make that the last step, since for now that 5mm hole is a convenient place to hold onto these guys for painting.

 

The next step is then to scratch-build a 1/48 replica of the pylon system that the UAF scratch-built at 1:1 for the real deal.  Start by truncating a Tornado pylon (stolen from the Revell 1/48 kit that I'll now need to build one of these days) at the point shown in photos of UAF Fencers in the field.

 

 

The missiles build up nicely.  Here they are with the truncated Tornado pylons partly done and the native Fencer pylons that attach to the wing boots.

 

 

And then a mock-up of the full stack together.

 

 

One thing that is crystal clear is that this solid-resin Storm Shadow is heavy.  This whole thing is going to require pinning together and into the wing boot if it is going to stay stuck on.  And given the location of the physical interfaces between the parts, that's three separate pairs of pins per side - nothing lines up in a way that would allow you to thread the whole thing together on a single pair of brass rods (without them being visible between the two pylons, that is).  So off to do that now.

[Martinnfb]

Sweet!, that paint job is spot on. Joy to follow.

Cheers

Martin