Night Swallow's night fighting double cockpit

A two-person tub

My best understanding about any of the WWII plane cockpits came from flight simulators, the one with the most hours was a slightly ageing European Air War, while IL-2 Sturmovik was a bit fresher, but I hadn't touched that one in something like 15+ years now. Luckily the wonderful world of the interwebs contained reference images such as this one here:

SRC: https://airandspace.si.edu/multimedia-gallery/image/web10866-2008hjpg

There was no way I'd get that hysterically close even if I did my bestestest. This photo helped me to figure out what all that crap in the cockpit was, and that was valuable in deciphering the instructions.

The pilot's workstation

In the two-person cockpit the frontmost was the pilot's place and that was where the adventure started.

Assembling the front seat

Having very little clue of anything I didn't try to optimize prematurely, and instead I followed the instructions as obediently as one could. An airplane model started from the cockpit, that this time wasn't a simple tub with a couple of tiny flakes glued into it, but it was a couple of separate plates. These first pieces became the arm consoles of the pilot and the sides between which the pilot sat. Well, I knew that the throttle controls lived on the left side, and if I remembered correctly the landing gear toggle was somewhere front left. This construction was glued into a wall, and I assumed the bit behind the pilot's butt was a battery. At least it looked like a battery to me.

The floor piece got a bar for the rudder, and the pilot's joystick. This also got glued into the back wall with a pretty tiny grabbing surface but I trusted it would become sturdier as the build progressed.

The foot pedals sat nicely on their cradle, and they looked pretty nice to my amateur eyes.

This pedal setup also fell in place pretty conveniently, so I could proceed to install the instrument panel parts in place. Now I was in a place where I had to seriously consider picking up the paints if I wanted to fit inside the model with my paintbrush. Maybe I had already passed that point from a airplane-dedicated hobbyis't viewpoint but I didn't know how to be the most efficient here.

I still had no dedicated weights to add into the nose, I remembered seeing that while skimming through the instructinos. I felt mad enough to consider pulling some cables or wires from the back of the IP to also add some little extra weight. The risk was that I'd stupidly do something I felt like instead of doing it correctly. Perhaps that was a silly detail to be left for the serious and dedicated ones.

While playing with these loose bits I was concerned with the positioning and alignment: if something was a degree off, the whole shebang would be wrong when sealing this setup into the plane's hull. After taking this last photo I glued the assembled subassembly into its front wall. If my memory served, that was the wall between a fuel tank and the guns.

Weirdly early painting

Now I was in a stage where I had to start painting if I wanted to reach almost everything. Or like I thought before, I may have already gone past that moment, simply being unused to planes. I got my paintbrush and coated most of what I had built in a dark grey paint (VMA 71055 Black Grey RLM66). Instead of using the metallic paint that the instructions were pushing I drybrushed this with Cold Grey (VGA 72750 Cold Grey). On the surfaces I followed the guidance and shades as I could, only Anthrazite was something I didn't own so the front right panel was a bit different.

The most colour variety came for the joystick's base and the throttle levers that got a Wood brown on them, and the valve manifold levers next to the throttles got painted black. At this point I noticed I didn't actually have the correct green so I didn't finish the front wall or the joystick's stick part.

On the instrument panel I based the dials black. I thought I got them nicely done in one go but the photos revealed how wrong I was again: half-coated at best. Then I touched up a couple of toggles with red (VMA 71003 Red RLM23) but I didn't pull button or switch colours out of my hat to force variety.

 

After a couple of days in between and popping by a paintshop I continued on the plane. Some of the RLM66 bits got mostly prepainted into the sprues so I wouldn't be in weird problems in a difficult moment while building the cockpit. I didn't expect to have pinpointed all the difficulties in advance so it was more than likely that I'd be still touching up for days to come.

While I was fixing my doings, I filled up the panel faces in black (VMA 71057 Black) and then smudged some dial-like stuff on them. I really didn't dare to try to poke any white, yellow, and red sectors onto the three rows of engine dials on the right, I'd only made a mess if I tried to. Of course I didn't try to fill them all semicorrectly, I wasn't even sure if these could be seen in the first place. After taking these photos and letting the paint dry, I coated the dials with Vallejo's Gloss Varnish.

Onto the engine's three-row dialset I just painted the background in cold grey and then off-white (VMA 71119 White Grey) switches. I didn't try to do anything cooler than that, I imagined one could barely see these later on. After taking the photos and allowing the paint to dry I coated all the dial faces with Vallejo's Gloss Varnish (70510). 

Radar operator's workstation

Now that I had spent a couple of days on the pilot's stuff and partially painted some upcoming things, I finally could glue some radar dude's things together. When I was prepainting I concentrated on things I now knew to be difficult to paint later. While painting I left the attachment points as clear as possible, when I recognized them, to avoid making a mess with the glue. This wasn't perfect, of course. Compared to the pilot's space the radar operator's side was much flimsier and only connected to the whole from a tiny stud hooked into the pilot's back plate.

 

Seats with belts

To support the gluings I used Vallejo's liquid putty. While that stuff was curing I finished up the seats that also ended up getting the decal seatbelts on them. They were neat-looking, but just as annoying as decals usually have been. Both had the same problems, maybe I could use a drop of paint to get the left shoulder belt's attachment loops stuck in place?

Inner armoured tub

Getting the tub's halves together was more bothersome than I hoped for. As I guess I should've expected, I hadn't been as precise as German engineers when building the cockpit so I had to sand and file a bit to get the crap squeezed in place. To support my inner peace I used more liquid putty to seal the setup, and left the setup to cure. I could sand them down the next evening before jumping a couple of sections noseward .

It was funny how quickly the cockpit turned much more claustrophobic. Not much of the tub's inner walls were visible but I had painted and drybrushed them so they would be properly done. There was a red handle on the righthand side of the pilot's side wall. Again, if my memory served, it was for releasing the drop tanks or bombs. That most likely wasn't something one could see from a closed cockpit, but it was there, a RLM23 red handle in a sea of RLM66 darkness.

As planned I sanded the largest clumps of dry putty off the next evening and painted the outsides metallic (Vallejo Metal Color Airbrush Colors 77702 Duraluminium), and the upper edges in RLM66.

Project IX/26

Revell's larger scale night Swallow

As you could tell, the madness had struck me. I had contacted Tieto-Nikkari last year and asked if they had a 1:32 scale German planes to try out. My wishlist was pretty predictable, I guessed: Bf-109; Me-262; He-162 and I didn't mind the variant or model manufacturers. They had a Swallow in the shelf so I didn't need to toss a coin. This B-1/U-1 variant was a two-crew night fighter with a Neptun radar

Some ages ago I have made three of these in 1:72. One of them was the basic version (A-1a), one a camera plane (A-1a/U3), and one was the Storm Bird (A2-a) aka the fighter bomber variant. It was going to be interesting to see how over two decades showed in the end.

 

Pieces in bags

There was a silly amount of pieces and I left them waiting for a better moment to look at more closely. At a very quick glance this kit had at least four times the parts compared to the smaller planes.

 

Decals

No, they still did not call my attention. I also hadn't made myself order stencils for German numbers, so I wasn't sure if I had many options.

A peek at the instructions

First thought was that I could build it with its paws on the ground and the hatches opened. That I appreciated, even though I hadn't given a thought on how I'd want to build this plane. A standing one was nicer to photograph and I really enjoyed building and painting all the soon-to-be-hidden details. What annoyed me already was the little note telling me I had to find out 15 grams worth of tiny weights to hide inside the nose.

 

Airbus assembly

Airbus factory

A plane that was made out of a couple of silly pieces was indeed pretty simple to assemble. The plastic felt a bit flimsy to me, though. The cockpit area was built out of a few little pieces and that got sealed into the hull. I then glued the passenger windows in with white glue as it has worked nicely for transparents. When the hull halves were cured I glued the wings in, and added the rudder in place as well.

Both of the engines were built out of four pieces: the disc with the turbine blades, its rear end, and the two halves of the casing. I didn't glue them in place yet, I'd do that when I had the landing gear firmly set.

Getting the landing gear was surprisingly bothersome and I blamed the plastic type for it. Somehow this material just didn't want to cooperate with my glue (mr Surfacer S), and that caused tooth grinding. When the landing gear was in and cured, I then glued the engines in place.

I did not have any weights to hide inside the nose (the instructions told to use ten grams, and I was absolutely unprepared for this sort of nonsense), even the old fishing-related lead balls I had had were gone for decades at this point. Perhaps I could hide a black-paited screw behind the pilot's and copilot's seats if nothing else came up.

 

Apart from the cockpit window the plane was practically built. You could tell from the photos that there were some gaps, and I had to do something about them.

Puttying

I squeezed Vallejo's liquid putty where I decieded it was needed, and then blended the stuff with a damp paintbrush. When the goo was dry, I sanded the excesses away.

Maybe that was it for me, and I could hand it over to be painted? I thought I could recommend the Project Assistant I to start with the cockpit so we could glue the final transparent piece in its place. Their inspiration was fleeting, so it was pretty likely that I wouldn't be sharing the progress on this project quite as reliably as I did with my own builds.

Project VII/26

Another subcontracting project

The Project Assistant I wanted to paint an airplane. The options she had in mind were either a passenger jet or a large German plane, "as long as the German one didn't have any nazi markings". We popped by Tieto-Nikkari on the way from work one day and she chose Revell's Airbus A321-200 and left the 747s in either Lufthansa or Iron Maiden livery for a potential sequel.

Again the plan was that I'd build it and she'd take care of the painting. "Can I use your airbrush?" "I guess it's ok." I was curious to see what this ended up like, the previous models, an ISD and an a-52 felt to me like they were incomplete but I was told they were ready. What kind of a paintjob this one got was to be seen.

 

Finished: Project V/25

Starscream

The number two guy of the Decepticons, their Air Boss, and the fool who was constantly trying to undermine mighty Megatron's power, always failing in his coup attempts, Starscream was immediately recognizeable. Or he was if you were at least a fraction as excited about Transformers as I was in 1987 when I got my hands on the first Finnish-translated issue 1/87 of Semic's comic (mostly Marvel's US stories with some random UK stories here and there). I had never got myself any of the original three Seeker toys, not even from the flea markets, so while continously pondering on ordering the Masterpiece I fulfilled some childhood dream by painting a scale model to look like Starscream himself. And as you all very well knew, if it was worth doing, it was worth overdoing, so there were going to be two more of these models.

"My time will come, Megatron."

While slowly working on the remaining two F-15s I had to come up with a good storage solution for my unique Strike Eagle variant. One that didn't end up being full of dust. The other core requirement was that it had to be safe from our cats. Safer than it had been so far, I meant.

Photoset

Here we had them, a set of photos. Some of the shots I took suffered from my image editing methods and that I didn't get a flat enough ground set up in the light tent, which ended up with the canvas being wavy. That led to the bottoms of some shots being cropped due to half-visible wheels and such. This, clearly, required something else :tm: to solve my issues.

 

Strike Eagle's weathering

The weathering operation

Differing from the last post I expected this to be quite a bit shorter and calmer, as my plan was just to play with the oil paints a bit and maybe drybrush the autocannon port's surroundings a bit. It wouldn't be the only time my plans changed with the progress of the process.

Gloss varnish as a base

To protect my maintjob I brushed Vallejo's gloss varnish all over it. As the photo showed the rightmost drop tank still wasn't where it belonged. No rush, as long as I did it before going for the oils.

And yes, I did brush-apply the gloss coat, I just didn't feel like setting up the airbrushing stuff that evening and play with the canopy re-masking just to make this a tiny bit quicker. The smart approach would've been taking the canopy apart for a separate treatment and protect the cockpit on its own.

Now it would be the time for weathering and that was always lots of fun. I was so excited about the paint scheme already, I could not wait to get it to catch the eyes even better.

Sepia mess

I applied my wash pretty harshly all over the model, I clearly didn't concentrate on the gaps and grooves only. With this I wanted to get more variety on the hull in addition to the panels popping better.

Cleanup

After a bit of drying time I cleaned up most of the mess away with thinner. Doing this reminded me vividly why I wasn't a huge fan of airplanes in general: the left drop tank and half of a landing gear came off.

More oils

Sepia being out of the way I thought I could try different tricks on the upper and lower halves of the plane. On the top side I added little dots of grey, yellow and buff, and then I blended them along the length of the plane. This may have been the second or third time I tried out the dot filtering, this time I may have been a bit too cautious with the colours I chose.

On the opposite side I went mostly for blending Industrial Oil stains starting from the rear edges of the three landing gear bays. Who knew where this individual had been flying.

At this point I was about to take the model to the sauna to dry overnight, when I left my gear into a wrong place for  amoment, while I was standing next o them. Of course I was slower than a jumping cat, and the plane fell on its wheels on the ground. The victims were the other main landing gear and the nose wheel, both of which I started fixing the next evening.

The full bracket-shaped thing had broken off (and gotten lost) of the nose wheel, so I just swore and glued the wheel straight into the remains. This then affected the plane's posture and it looked like it was braking strongly after landing.

A satin varnish

I think I spent a silly amount of time pondering whether to use satin varnish as the finish or matt varnish. After the ponderings I chose Vallejo's Satin Varnish but knew I could change my mind if the reflections were too much after a day or two.

In the end the satin varnish was a bit too strong for my eyes. I then covered the plane with AK Interactive's super matt varnish.

 

Now I had just the landing lights to be fixed, or what remained after the cat helped a bit. The light was visible in the photo right above, but it had gotten more weathered than I required.

When the super matt varnish had cured I drybrushed black on the Vulcan's opening and did that for the grilles behind the cockpit too. Just to get them to stand out a tiny bit more.

This meant that the first of my three F-15s was done, except for the photo shoot.