Strike Eagle's airframe

From parts to plane

This was the largest and most noticeable amount of progress in a build. While the cockpit parts were curing I started setting the engine air intakes. That horizontal frame worked as the attachment point(set) for the wing roots.

I didn't start sanding or filling while the glue was not set, so I let them wait a good while, and also to give me some sort of an indication of what was even visible after a few more steps.

There was a video I saw some time earlier where a guy painted the intake ducts by filling them with glossy white house paint (he taped the bottom ends shut, filled with paint, let them sit for a moment, then drained the setup) while the instructions were telling to use metallic paint. Using white paint and glossy varnish with the airbrush one would get these tubes done cleanly in no time.

While the step 10's gluings were curing I drilled the instructed holes into the next bits. My finger drill only had a 1mm bit, so I used an old x-acto knife to extend the holes a bit from the outside.

I kept on building the hull, obediently following the instructions. In addition to finger-squeezing I also used old pegs and tape to keep bits in place while I was working on the next steps.

These air intake things were to be assembled separately and only then inserted in place. I didn't know this plane so I didn't trust myself to guess any shortcuts. The bits looked a bit thick, but I only thinned pieces if they didn't fit in place when and where instructions expected them to. Most likely my approach was suboptimal and even laughable in the eyes of a plane enthusiast.

Up until this point everything had been pretty clear and low in problems. The photo above showed a gap between the upper and lower hull halves and that told me that I had a fraction's offset much earlier that compounded into this, due to me now noticing in time. While installing these bits I could either align the lower or upper edge properly, leaving the other with a crevice. I chose to make the neck of the plane align well, as it was the more visible area.

My cockpit sat very nicely inside the airframe, if you managed to ignore the aforementioned gap. When the glue had flashed I made a bit of sepia wash and both applied it and cleaned up the excesses. In addition I also oiled the two pieces waiting to be installed to the canopy part, X-sprue's parts 71 and 73.

Assembling these engine nozzles took an unreasonable amount of time, thanks to the tiny and numerous sticks. The instruction said there were to be ten sticks each, but the step's picture showed many more already. I started by following the guidance, using two sticks per nozzle sector (5 per engine) and then added so-called extra ones between the early ones, getting closer to the picture in the instructions. In this WIP photo you could see one session's result, the next one the wrap-up and installation onto the plane itself.

Vertical stabilizers always gave me pause: were they straight or not, and were they supposed to be installed straight in the first place? Both pieces had different installation pegs, so you couldn't accidentally install them the wrong way. This was good for a plane-uninitiated such as myself.

My glorious plan was to build this in a flight mode, but I could not do that without large and questionable modifications: the landing gear doors were modeled only in their "open" state. After a very, very short pondering break I took the easier path and just followed the instructions for a landed plane. The wheels I left off for painting, and I didn't give more thought for the landing gear struts and their painting. These photos also showed how in the imperfect lighting conditions I had not even paid attention to some mould lines. Blah.

The two taxiing/landing lights in the front landing gear called for me to drill or carve them open, but based on a quick try with the tip of a drill I didn't dare to really start opening those tiny, flimsy bits. They'd looked so much better but maybe an intact landing gear was better than a bent or broken one.

This photo also showed the gap that was caused by some unknown mishap many hours gone. Maybe doing more of this would teach me to improve, but still: this was one of the key reasons why I didn't really care for planes, especially the modern ones. Or maybe it was the scale and I'd have much more fun in 1:32.

Somehow I had the time to glue the earlier oiled and cleaned pieces onto the main canopy piece. Had I thought a bit more, I'd first masked the canopy and after that glued things on, but I did it the other way this time. While I was at it, I whiteglued the HUD reflector in place before I forgot it altogether.

The solid front glass part I masked now to wait for the future. The masking of the main part was waiting for the white glue to dry safely. The instructions had a state for an open and closed cockpit: the difference was that the open one had a piston rod between the seats - the closed one didn't need it. I was still going to cut it down and glue it in place, maybe it'd be a fun detail.

The next evening I masked the canopy and attached the rod. Then I started the iterative dry-fit and cut more process, only to notice that this thing had been modeled so that if the canopy was down, there wasn't a fraction of a millimeter of this bit to be had anywhere. Funny thing, so I took the final stub off and didn't even bother shrugging.

The plane started looking quite a lot like an airplane now, the priming was waiting just behind the corner. Before that I had to do some cleaning up, of course, but ignoring the armaments the instructions were just about completed now. I took a moment to enjoy the progress. This was the result of what, six sessions of assembly, and one of those went to the jet nozzles alone.

Pitot tubes were missing from the hull, so I added them now. Of the ordnance I decided to install just the underwing bits, and put the numerous missiles and bombs in storage.

With this the building stage was complete. Based on the timestamps of my photos I spent eight sessions on it. And like I said, one solely on the engines. That was so silly I had to keep bringing it up.

Second Line details

A long collection of steps

I started all this by fixing the tan-coloured parts on the upper hulls that caught my attention. On top of that I mixed in some white and drybrushed the edges somewhat cautiously just to give them some more worn and light-shadow highlighting before I would reach the oil washing stage.

Metallic barrels and other pieces

Then I stopped for a bit to ponder on which metallic paint to use on all these guns. Gunmetal, steel, oily steel, chrome? The chrome paint would probably be a bit over the top even on Clanners. A clean metal sounded like a decent match with the light paint scheme, but not standing out way too much. Maybe.

After painting the weapons with gunmetal I used Vallejo's Duraluminium (77702) on various joints and a couple of jump jets.

After spending a couple of years using dark grey on bare metals, using something this bright was indeed a bit baffling.

Jade highlights

Running with the story I thought that these five had been turned from various Wolves to Jade Wolves with a bit of a rush and even less pre-planning. To support that I thought that the amount of jade highlights wouldn't be huge and they wouldn't be anything elaborate. Before hitting the paint with a brush I was thinking along the lines of doing the front edges of missile launchers and such, and adding some individual stripes in places. Some of these could be done with all the care in the world, some "I was running out of paint, Star Commander, so I had to thin it down a bit to be able to finish my job"-kind of moments. I would, as always, decide as the actual painting progressed.

I concentrated more on the torsos and arms than the legs, but that was how I always did it. I also decided that I wasn't going to try any freehanded Clan, Galaxy, Cluster or any other insignia, as they weren't really even defined anywhere. So they had to be ok with just the general paint scheme, I wasn't going to invent any markings myself.

Oil wash with cleanup

My hobby time happened to squiggle into the calendar in a way that I got to touch up the gun barrels before the oil wash. That the Marauder IIC and Stone Rhino had the upper barrels so different was intentional, and after the oil wash got cleaned up I'd go retouch them again with gunmetal. Of the three here you could see best how the sandy paint had shown a bit underneath, and I wanted that gone.

With a very little effor the armour surfaces were so much cleaner again.

Here was a quick WIP pose, after the cleanup session. The next step was to poke all the barrels again, maybe re-highlight the upper frames with a drybrush. As soon as the thinner had flashed, that is.

A highlight round

The planned quick cleanup/highlighting round contained repainting the three aforementioned gun barrels with Vallejo's Gunmetal, and drybrushing the upper torsos with the original Tan Earth. The idea was to enhance the way the local sun's light hit the 'Mechs, I didn't go for the oil buffing this time, even if it was a fun effect. Before the lenses I also painted each of the barrel ends and viewport panes in black.

Lenses, cockpits and Jump Jets

For the jeweling I followed my now-standard recipe based on Vallejo paints. In it all the small lasers started with a Bloody Red base, all the mediums from Escorpena Green, the large ones from Magical Blue, and the various Particle Projector Cannons and Jump Jets all were based on Electric Blue. Each of the cockpits was always based on something that stood out from the scheme, now I picked the red, just like for the flashlights.

Marauder IIC only had a single glass pane in the front, the gun pods and the turret had ER PPCs, and the Medium Pulse Lasers were also in the arm pods. An array of ER Small Lasers were installed just below the cockpit. This gave a wide red-green-blue scale for the energy weapons, even if the Large Laser's shade was missing.

Over the head of the Stone Rhino we had two Gauss Rifles, then Large Pulse Lasers in arms, and a Small Pulse Laser in the middle of its chin. The cockpit was pleasantly simple, if a bit narrow. The Jump Jets lived in the calves and in the middle of its back.

Warhammer IIC's loadout was nice: ER PPCs in the arms, an SRM-6 launcher on the shoulder, and around the torso a set of five Medium Pulse Lasers. That five-part canopy under a heavy brow was a bit bothersome to paint, which made it also difficult to see from most angles. For reference the photo below: you couldn't see much redness in there.

This basic variant of Supernova was just about as insane as Nova's, but heavier and hence smaller in numbers: six ER Large Lasers in clusters of three. The Jump Jets were in the legs and back, as usual. Nine pieces of cockpit viewports made me think it was designed in the way Dornier bombers were, but at least these were pretty decently sized, unlike some competitors.

As your run-of-the-mill Hunchback had an AC/20 on its shoulder, the Clan-improved Hunchback IIC of course had two largest Ultra AutoCannons the factories could produce, and a pair of ER Medium Lasers in the middle of its chest. Jumpjets included. In comparison to the original HBK the IIC's viewport was quick and easy to paint properly.

 

Cockpits, round II

Unsurprisingly I didn't quite have the time to get all done in one painting session, but luckily I could jump back in the next evening. Only after these touchups were done and the painted bits had dried properly, it was time for the gloss varnish. Those two Gauss Rifles still needed a bit more work, the bastards.

Gauss rifle effect, variant 3

Stone Rhino's Gauss Rifles were waiting for the heat stress effects, and that's why I was so bothered with the painting of the metals themselves. This was exactly the same effect I was mumbling about a couple of silly weeks ago, but now on a different base. I redid the same approach as the last time: three slightly overlapping bands of stippled washes (Citadel's sepia, violet, blue) instead of flooding the surface.

From this viewpoint the sepia part didn't really convince me, perhaps I could've used the original recipe's bottom-most shade (whichever the Citadel's darker brown one was) but this could also work with just the violet and blue band alone, I thought. On some parts the brown had ended up in a thicker layer than on some other parts, like you could see from the side view on the next photo, where the effect was much more subtle. I guess this was a yet another case of lack of skills.

 

Last things to be remembered

Looking back at all the stuff I had now typed down, what was I forgetting? Maybe I had tried to collect a bit too much into one single post, so writing things down on various days increased the danger of something falling between the cracks.

On these bits there were few ammo-consuming weapons, so I didn't do soot stains on more than Hunchback IIC's murdercannons' front, back, and spent casing ejector ports. The Warhammer IIC's searchlight box needed some sensor lenses, so I painted them with Yellow Ochre and one brighter shade. I did this instead of painting the whole thing as a searchlight unlike back in the day. The SRM-6 launcher was in need of a cleanup after all the messing up, so I painted the caps in jade.

 

Nearing the end of this sessionset I painted the various grilles and vents with diluted dark grey. The Abteilung Sepia wash hadn't been quite strong enough, so I did this as an extra layer of shadowing. My absolutely final step was to apply the Vallejo Gloss Varnish on all of the lenses, viewports, and the Warhammer IIC's searchlight/sensor complex.