Strike Eagle's gap fixings

Sealing the openings

My earlier self would've started painting the model as it was and not really cared about the tiny gaps and extra edges here and there. Age had done its tricks to me and I was gently suffering from the irregularities and pointless holes, so I was going to close them up.

The cockpit canopy

First step was to seal the cockpit using white glue on the cockpit edges and the canopy edges. I started with the solidly installed small front glass, and after a moment of setting I started installing the larger part in its place. Enough glue was used to make the cockpit paint-safe but little enough to prevent the glue from spreading everywhere in an ugly manner.

Plastic putty

Sometime last year I bought a tube of Vallejo's Plastic Putty and I had already tried it out on the armpits of the Nebeltruppen but I may not have mentioned it at all at the time. This was the first supposedly proper time I tried the product. I tried to be cautious with the amounts, using it to fill up the most bothersome gaps that annoyed my eyes, and each of the installation holes that I was not going to use.

At this point I noticed that the arrester hook was in a completely wrong place in the middle of the belly. I had been wondering at the image in the instructions and misunderstood it badly. Luckily it came off without violence and I got to glue it in the correct place. What had been wrong with me last week?

My sealing job wasn't perfect and I could imagine a fanatical airplane modeler going ballistic with this kind of foolishness. Sad stuff.

Cleaning with water

With some goo spread around I started cleaning up the biggest clumps of it with an old, tap water -wet paintbrush. Clearly I could've done this in smaller batches, some of the plastic putty had set so well that it took a good amount of poking to reactivate. The next photo showed that despite it I had gotten a good amount of the excesses cleaned up from the underwings.

On a second spin-around I found a couple of places I had missed earlier, so I did some touching up and left the remains to be mechanically removed some other evening. I didn't take any photos of that part, so the next stage was going to be priming.

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.

Strike Eagle's cockpit

Workstations for the pilot and gunnery officer

Where did you start the assembly on all the planes but the cockpits? Over the years I've assembled a few airplanes, but still the fact that you were to build and paint a thing way before you continued with the majority of the build was weird to me. With my skills, and, shall we say limited amount of ability to nitpick about the details of airplanes, no one would probably notice if I just built everything and only then painted what could be seen.

Despite thinking of this I obeyed the instructions like a polite modeler and built what my limited sense told me to build in the first stage. That was the tub, and then the two ACES II ejection seats for both crewmembers.

When the glue had flashed I painted what I could or what made sense to paint at this point. As the interior colour I used the first grey I hit my hands on, Vallejo's Stonewall Grey (VGA 72749). The little panels I painted following both their shapes and the instructions, using Black Grey (VMA 71056).

Without any funky tools I had to paint the ejection seasts in two parts to avoid hitting my fingers into wet paint. The frames of the seats I painted with the dark grey, those ejector triggers with yellow ochre (VMA 71033), and the padding with sand yellow (VMA 71028).

While the previous stuff was drying I painted the instrument panel bits that were still on the sprues. I thought that this way I wouldn't be throwing them around tables and floors while painting. As the basecoat I used the same stonewall grey with dark grey panels where the instructions guided me. Had I been more in the mood, I'd masked the panels off and airbrushed instead, but this scale didn't call for that level of detail in my books.

When I got to it I drybrushed the dark panels with the lighter grey. Once again I was shown that when the drybrush brush seemed to be dry against the paper towel, it wasn't still clean enough. The plastic caught paint so much easier than the paper.

When I returned to the ejection seats I painted the missing parts and added dark green (VMA 71094 Green Zinc Chromate) bits to the seats. And when they had dried, I drybrushed the metallic parts with steel (VMA 71065).

While drybrushing I also poked at the cockpit tub, I mostly concentrated on the pedals and the edges, then I also touched up the instrument panels to highlight the beveled edges of the panels. Before the paint was dry on my non-palette I also painted the HUD's projector plate with steel in preparation for the future.

Now that I got up to speed with the green paint on the seats I mixed some of  that to the dark grey and used it on each of the MFDs. Had I planned this in advance, I'd prepared them all in flat black or dark grey for the screen edges. Well, maybe I remembered that when I worked on the other two F-15s later on.

I had to confess now that had I not got so excited about the jeweling on the 'Mechs and their cockpits, I most likely would never had gone any further than this on these so-called more serious models. But here we were, and I painted a lighter green blob into each panel's lower corner and then the white anime reflections to opposite corners. Not that anyone was ever going to see that in the finished model.

Assembling and painting a bit more

Now I glued the ejection seats into their places, and I had to doublecheck that yes, they did sit that high up. Or the armrests were that low. I also glued the pilot's joystick to stand happily in its place, in as neutral a position as I managed. After that it was the time to install the IPs. The plates fit in just nicely, which made me happy.

After a bit of flashing time I glued the covers over the instrument panels. They most likely had some spots left to fix, but this was easier than swearing with the glue-paint mess the older approach would've caused. As long as I realized to fix them in time, that is. Now I had a good moment to apply a bit of Vallejo's gloss varnish on the displays, later on it would've been way too bothersome.

The steel layer on the projector was now dry, so I stippled some Citadel's blue wash on it (Drakenhof Nightshade). When that had had a moment to cure, I stippled around and near it some violet (Drukii Violet). That didn't give me an iridescent rainbow, not even close, but it was more than I had ever thought of doing for a HUD. If the Citadel's green wash that I had bought in the late half of the '90s was still alive, I'd maybe use a drop of it as well but I wasn't counting on it.

Well well well, the Green Wash I bought at some point between 1996 and 1998 was still as good as ever, at almost 30 years on the planet. I stippled some of it on the projector to see how it behaved.

Now the office spaces were just about done. I did install a handle-thingie on top of the gunnery officer's IP cover. Then I had just the throttle lever and the bomber's three joysticks and the HUD screen left. I really didn't know what the rear seater did with those sticks but my uneducated guess was "everything".

After the installations and paintings of said controllers was done I marked the correct places on the hull for the tub's gluings, and then painted the remaining inner walls with light grey. While looking at photos of F-15E cockpits I realized that the ejection seats had to have green gas bottles on the lefthand sides of the seat frames. I checked that they had indeed been modeled on, and painted them light green (VMC 70942), grumbling that I hadn't noticed them earlier.

Based on a pretty quick ddg search those were emergency oxygen tanks. I was just left thinking if I ought to paint those tubes going out with rubber black to make them look more correct than this metal-drybrushed things. Anyone reading my nonsense had to know by now that if I was poindering it out loud, i was also just about to pick a paintbrush up.

Tub sealage

The inner tub walls were painted with the same colour as the cockpit details. No details had been omdeled on the inner walls, no panels or anything, so I didn't start freehanding or modeling anything from scratch.

With the paint dry I drilled the instruction-demanded holes with my finger drill, the insides of the halves had nice indents for the upcoming holes. Based on a dry-fit the tub fit nicely inside the plane's hull parts, and it got glued in tight into the right half. After a bit of curing I glued the left half on the rest, and squeezed the setup tight together. Finally I taped a couple of parts together while waiting for the next modeling session.

I was really thinking that the cockpit had to be pin washed, but I wasn't sure of the order of business. Another question, very much related to this, was when should the HUD plate be glued on. Should I glue it on right now, or after the oil wash round to avoid funny-shaped lumps? The latter option sounded cleaner to me.

While pondering I checked the instructions ahead and realized that when the cockpit canopy was to be glued on, a couple of pieces needed to be glued into the canopy par, and I had not prepared those pieces yet. To avoid another forgetful moment I painted them now with light grey. This gave me the thinking time to decide that I would do the pin washing when the nose was installed into the body of the plane, and after that I'd glue the HUD plate on. This might also prevent any accidental "whoopsies" moments with the loose cockpit subassembly.

Project V/25

Revell F-15E Strike Eagle

Santa brought me both a Panzer Aces set of paints and surprisingly, a 1:72-scale F-15 that I had wished for, and this was a subtype E. I didn't mind the config myself, and this was the first of the three F-15s I wanted to implement a funny (to me) idea.

This multimodel main project affected how I was going to handle the documentation of this first plane.

Most probably I'd go with a build, cockpit painting, and the priming, maybe even the basecoating of the plane would be included in IV/25, then it would be stored until the other two would have reached the same stage. At that point, with the triplet in the place where they'd diverge, I could do the actual paintjob as its own subproject.

Optionally I'd do this one from start to finish but just skip sharing the paintjob until I was far enough with the others. Some basics I would need to paint in a recognized and proper way anyway, like the titanium engine cowlings and whatnot.

Instructions

On a cursory glance the coloured instructions were pretty clear, I appreciated the colours supporting the A-Z flags. Especially the colouring of the weaponry was a very nice detail. Was I going to bother following those? We'd see.

Bits

There were three transparent pieces this time, the canopy bits and the collector plate for the HUD. Maybe I ought to paint the sides with a coloured wash instead of doing them black. I had to look into that stuff, as I had no clue right now.

All I could say about these was that they looked like pieces of an airplane.