My new airbrush cleaning jar

A multifunctional jar

In the turn of '18/19 the Yule Goat or his henchfolk brought me a jar for cleaning up my airbrush. The 3-in-1 on the box meant that in addition to the self explanatory part the pot also had an airbrush holder that was handier than keeping the damn thing between my teeth while taking a rushed photo or refilling the paint container a tiny bit more. And the third feature? The lid had a three-compartment bottom molded in, which could be used for mixing paints, when the lid was set upside down. That's something I didn't try out so I couldn't comment on its usefulness.

That black thing on top was the airbrush holder. In front of it (to the right) one could maybe notice a hole, that was an exhaust opening (a round filter apparently of cotton was inserted on the inside of it). For the cleaning up process about 3cm of water was to be added into the container itself.

Testing, testing

When priming the Lambda-class shuttle I tried out 66,666...% of the features offered by the cleaning jar, as I guess I somehow said already. The holder was handy and sturdier than I had thought originally. Cleaning up the airbrush was much cleaner, considering the surroundings, and also less smelly than without this thingamagick.

Perhaps the wonderfulness of the cleaning pot would be much more apparent on a different building/painting process or its phase, where I was using small, quick batches of numerous different paints. I'd know better after doing that myself, so maybe I'd remember to comment on that later on in the future.

Reprimage

Pointless or not

It was more or less based on a coin toss if it made any sense to reprime this huge model white before going repainting in shades of everlightening greys. Still I decided to do it because I had found so much unpainted surface to begin with, added more with my greeblies and sandings. That made it more appealing than laziness. Besides, painting over white would show much more clearly what I'd done and what I had not.

Round one

All in all this fresh coat of primer took three sessions over three evenings. The pics show some work in progress moments from different angles. I wasn't aiming for a perfect coating, mostly because my airbrush nozzle was not designed for vast surfaces (especially over time, but I guess I could've used some retardant to make that a bit easier). For that sort of stuff I'd need a different nozzle altogether. Anyway, I had to admit that the shuttle looked better white than grey.

Preparing for the repriming

Cockpit work

There wasn't much to do but to clean some corners around viewport. Most likely no one would notice anything, as I didn't really say anything based on the photos afterwards...

At this point I just cut off tiny bits of masking tape and covered the installation points of the two seats. Just to allow for easier gluing later on.

The landing gear

Obviously I had no recollection how the landing gear bay doors were installed, where the attachment points were not to mention how tightly I had glued them on. Luckily already a tiny bit of poking with the point of the hobby knife revealed the weak points and the hatches came off very easily and cleanly.

I cleaned the injector marks from the hatches where I had left them so many years ago. Dry-fitting the doors made me think if they'd like some tiny cables running around, but most likely I wasn't going to do anything of the sort. They'd only be visible if one took the model in their hands and made an effort to see everything everywhere.

My largest foreseeable headache in this change I had decided to make were the landing gear feet, that I had practically just torn off with some violence. Maybe a couple of bits of paperclips as "bones" bones would improve the structural integrity so that the damn thing wouldn't just fall on its belly after a random delay.

More greeblies

Remaking up my mind

Of course I could not leave the folding wings as they were, now that my main wing was all-over filled with junk. I jumped back to my thousand boxes (this may be exaggerating a bit, they should be called hundred boxes at best at this stage still) and chose the longest and narrowest bits I could find (I'd been again very happy to use KwK halves if they only fit), as long as they were again doubled, for maintaining symmetricality.

Again my apologies for forgetting to take WIP photos in my excitement of crafting something. Mostly my filler greeblies ended up being parts of tow cables and something I guessed to be the hanging structure of some armored skirts (Schürzen). These last bits would've been so much more interesting, had I not had to cut off their attachment bits (you know those bandaid-like things to hold pipes on some flat surfaces), but as the space real estate was limited, I just had to go all hacky.

In the end the side wings did not end up being full 1:1 copies of each other but they had a couple of tiny differences between them. Maybe that'd add some to the general interestingness of the model. I just was pretty bugged because I really couldn't hide some silly pieces there that could've been fun to see if anyone noticed or recognized them. Well, I did at least one, but a couple more couldn't have hurt.