Christer A

Thanks @corsaircorp, @Steve Coombs, @Ray_W, @Paulaero and @TonyOD! I really liked what I achieved with the cockpit! Almost looking forward to the next one, and I sort of realised that I need a Mk II as well. Regarding the tips for Milliput and such, I'll keep that in mind for the next one. I did use tape though, but that was way too far from where I sloshed the Tamiya putty. Oh, High bloodpressure? Pfff, that doesn't bother me a bit! This night was spent at the hospital since I apparently have a nice case of kidney stones. That was not a pleasant experience at all, and those darned rocks haven't bothered to come out yet either! Still, the pain has receded so there's that!

Let's carry on with the cockpit then! The instrument panel ha quite a few options to choose from. There is a lovely plastic one that needs careful painting to bring out all details. It's also available as a flat one for those who prefer decals.. Or the third option, which I choose: 5 pieces of etch, but glued to a center plastic piece that slots into the cockpit structure. That bit is of great importance, since it's a mess to try to install a thin etch panel in the fuselage. What cannot be seen in this picture is the actual clear blobs that's supposed to be the glass on top of the dials. This is included in the printed etch, on the faces layer. Neat! So, after installing that in the cockpit, together with side consoles, etched levers and stuff, and some weathering later I arrived at this. I'm very satisfied how that turned out! Quite similar to the Big 1/24 Tiffy too I'm pretty sure that almost nothing will be seen once the coaming is installed... That opening to get down in the cockpit sure isn't big. I guess they used lard or something to get in and out faster? The stress factor when bailing out and the need to climb out of that narrow cockpit must be huge! Speaking of stressfactor, it's time to tackle a weak spot for this kit: The split between upper and lower wing is not at the trailing edge but a bit further inboards. It will lead to a much thinner LE for sure, but you do get a rather unsightly seam line to deal with, one that is located in the middle of the flaps. I tried to sand and dryfit to avoid a step but I couldn't avoid the small small gap between the parts. Dang it! Time for filler then. At least the wheel bays popped nicely with thin wash 🙂

The helicopter and Skyraider in the background of the rendered pictures above are also interesting. PR responses were a lot of nudge nudge, wink wink.

Gold 12 is actually a proper museum piece, on loan from Swedish Airforce Museum to the "Jämtlands Flyg och Lottamuseum" located on old airfield called Optand in Östersund. They do have a bunch of interesting stuff there, even though I've never been there. https://www.flygolotta.se/ (website appears to be in swedish only)

Thanks for the cheers guys! A quick dryfit revealed no major unknown issues, so from the top it looks very nice. The underside wing/flap joint will need a lot of care though, but I'll cross that river once I get to it. With the wheel bays constructed and painted (but not dirtied up yet!) I turned my attention to the internal bits in the fuselage. The radiator and it components are nice, but somewhat fiddly to install. I'm leaning towards Roland Beamonts early machine, just because it's kinda fancy with the yellow nose and neat id-stripes under the wings (not the D-day stripes then!) I still think it looks a bit bare in the center without any dust filter, but those didn't come online until the other half of -44 if I remember my Sabre history correctly. Well, a little wash will improve the look of it I'm sure. Looking at the cockpit I've heard some people having lots of fear for the side "walls" or rather pipe structure These were in one piece on the sprue itself and careful use of a razor saw made sure that they still was in one piece later on. Very delicate stuff! Another positive thing is the cockpit coaming. To have that as a separate part seems to work very fine! The dry fit shows no issues basically and the good thing is that it allows for a very secure installation of the gun sight. Sights is usually a weak spot in mot kits, usually represented by a clear piece blob of unknown shape. Not so with this kit! I think both early and late sights are included on all boxings, and with different support structure and so on. The fiddly bits are those spare light bulbs though. They might have all sorts of fancy details on them, but being in clear plastic you can't see a thing! The rudder pedals are a bit of a disappointment though. The pedals themselves are the problem. In plastic they do not look like the real thing, and in etch they are nigh on impossible to fold and install since there's no good mating surfaces. I tried to fold them to something that resembles the real thing, but that didn't stick...so I had to revert to the plastic ones. The narrow cockpit opening will probably prevent anyone from ever seeing them again though 😇 After all that (well, it wasn't that much) I assembled the cockpit and gave it a first coat of paint. Time to do some detail painting and fiddly etch construction. Oh and the blood pressure? Holding steady at around 145/90 or so most of the time according to my measurements. We'll see next week what the good doctor says once I deliver all data to him.

It really looks good in black, doesn't it? I really like what you did to the exhaust area with all the etch and whatnot. It looks just like a Viggen there! Bonus, there was actually one black Viggen: A special paintjob for a JA37DI !

I decided to leave the canopy aside for a bit, and focus on the fun bits instead. Fuselage didn't require that much putty to be nice and neat A dry fit showed that some work was required to close the gap between wing and fuselage. The right side is a little bit wors though: However, After the glue had set, I saw that the wing was not horizontal so I had to pry it off and redo the whole thing... This time it came out all right! Time for some more filler. But after this, I need to get back to the canopy again...

It seems like I've hit a bad patch recently, with a work/life balance that was not really balanced. It seems that too much stress at work really isn't good for you...who would've thought? The trip to the doctors office actually showed a low steady heart rhythm, good exercise regime but high blood pressure. It's probably not related at all to the Valom Bristol Firebrand that I'm wrestling with over at the Salty Sea dogs GB While the doctor is requesting more data and me collecting said stuff for a few weeks, I decided to go clean up my workbench. It was stacked about 5 projects deep (2 P38, a Firebrand, a P-47, and a F-16 was found, together with some pieces of Lansen, Viggen and a few other bits). I'm sure that this has never happened to anyone else, and I'm completely unique in this aspect. Anyway, the cleanup was fairly quick, nothing was binned and all of a sudden I found myself with a nice and tidy bench. What now? Puttying the Firebrand? Decaling a swing-wing? Masking a P-47? No! Don't ever finish stuff, that could only lead to ruin, so instead I brought forth this. Much better! Well molded, oodles of detail, a few extra bits and bobs as well, and apparently a mostly stellar fit. So, caution thrown overboard, and the snipper started to work on the wheel bays. That's quite a few bits to build up the bays!! This was also a shot of primer, and a base coat of interior green, like so. A dark wash in the will do nicely I think! Main fuselage also got a lick of paint while the airbrush was loaded with the correct colors. Looking at the rear of the fuselage, I've only seen this amount of raised and lowered rivets on one other kit. That would be the 1/24 Tiffy that I built (more than) a few years back No oil canning on the Eduard Tempest though! But for 1/48, this is awesome.

Yeah, that canopy is really bothersome! I do have two vacu formed ones, but they're equally bad. It sort of looks lite a Spitfire hood in places (but not at all, if you see what I mean) so maybe I can raid the spares box for some leftover bits and see if I can adapt something. If that does not work, then I'll do the best with what I have. Don't have the skills nor the equipment to do my own vacu forming, so that goes out.

Oh, there will be drama for sure! Most of the proper plastic are behaving quite well, but the biggest challenge is the vacu clear parts. Ooooh boy. They have drawn these from the thinnest of sheet they could find, using the most leaky vacu equipment possible (I'd say that it sucks, but apparently not enough) The end result is a flimsy shapeless block that bends and flexes as soon as you look at it. Cellophane is probably thicker than this, and more distortion free as well. Off course, it didn't help that I dropped both canopies on the floor and stepped on them...

Thanks Tony! Let's get cracking on the cockpit and fuselage then. Valom gives a decent amount of plastic and photoetch to work with: Decent might be pushing it, but at least there is a control column, etched rudder pedals, belts and a sandwich instrument panel (etch, film and plastic). Dryfit revealed quite quickly that the cockpit tub itself had nothing to secure it in place, just a thin groove to show where it was supposed to go. Well, that didn't do so I added some plastic pieces to secure it in place. The turtledeck (I think it's called?) had to be widen a bit, and a small wedge of plastic solved that. It does appear as it has a step to it now and that is correct! There is a similar step in the fuselage though so it all pans out in the end. There is a little roof for the rear weel well, but nothing else, so I decided to box it in a bit. This will be painted after the fuselage has been joined, since the opening in the fuselage are somewhat irregular... After the fitting problems I started to prime, and paint the cockpit and also gave it a little wash: Installing the instrument panel also required a few more support bits ad hopefully the IP will stay in the fuselage now. The finished cockpit: Valom also includes about a gazillion tiny etched levers to sprinkle around the cockpit but I decided that life is too short to try to fit those, especially since it's almost impossible to ascertain where they should go. So without further ado, I closed the fuselage. So far, stage 2 is progressing quite smoothly!

A good sheet of wet & dry would've helped for sure. Too bad that I got bad ones for my Gannet project (when you end up removing more sand than plastic, you know you have a substandard product) and didn't feel like it was need to do that once more. Oh well. I got some nice turned brass Hispanos for this one: Perhaps not 100% match since they're intended for a Firefly, but a lot nicer than the plastic ones! With an extra resin lump attached, the wing is now complete! Some panel lines have been rescribed , and I plan to shoot some primer on it quite soon, but other than that, I call Stage 1 complete! Onwards to the fuselage!

Oh, I'm sure to have a FAA subject or two somewhere (and a Buccaneer is winging it's way here right now). Count me in!

The detail difference between resin and plastic isn't that great. Primary driver for using the resin ones is off course to show them in the ground configuration. Nice and tidy work on the big parts!

White bands like that is usually the sign of some exercise-marking of some sort. Not as fun or prominent as those Ö68-checkers that used for an enormous exercise (and immortalized in Roy Cross Airfix Draken boxart)

Bitte sehr, Sam! "fuel tank on 1, RB74 on 2 and 3 plus the Filips on 6 and 7." This would be the most realistic one. It's a little bit unclear of what the outer outer wing pylons actually was wired for during AJS-upgrade. During the AJ-time, the outer pylons were for Rb28 only (AIM-4C). since Flygvapnet had a whole bunch of them. Then off course someone took a long hard look at it an concluded that it actually sucks, and is far from ideal for self defence. Low height and high speed was deemed sufficient. So in effect, only 4 stations were actually in use for weapons or pods. There are some pictures of AJS machines where they have actually hung Sidewinders on those pylons, but if it was actually wired for it is a different question.

These are were interesting questions, and my knowledge of the tactical side is limited to say the least. The AJS modifications to AJ, SH, and SF primarily upgraded the onboard computer and connected systems to allow for a more diverse use of weapons, like RBS15F, BK90 and Rb74. No ECM suite was built in. The actual tactic to stop a landing fleet would have been hectic to say the least. The whole plan was more or less to get everything in the air, head eastwards over the sea, launch all missiles, return, rearm and do it again and again, until either all ships are gone, or all Viggens and it's pilots are... I'm guessing here since I don't really know if they attacked with 8, 4 or 2 ships team. For sure, not all would had a jammer pod, since there wasn't enough to go around. The same goes for the pods for chaff and flares... And all were pods that took up a weapon station! It was just the JA that had that stuff built in. The typical Gripen layout of two Rbs15f and two Rb75 could be flown at least, but to my knowledge it couldn't really be used. The computer didn't like to have two different "main" weapons systems on board, so if Rbs15F were carried, not other air-to-ground (sea) weapons could be used except for countermeasures or Sidewinders.

Never heard about this Hawker projekt before but it looks really cool! Good luck with it!

Oh yes, the mighty Viggen! Somewhere hidden on the Shelf of Doom I put most of the stuff for a AJSH that I started while sitting underneath a AJSF Viggen... I came roughly to this point before other things started to poke for attention... So, in an ideal world, I would've joined you straight away, but I got sidetracked by some group builds or five! That square under the wing is not a RWR (that's what the two pods on the wing are for, and another ar found above the engine, pointing rearwards) but a dopler-radar. This one is connected to the navigation system on the AJ-family. The circled parts a bit further up in the thread on the engine is guide vanes, to help with straightening the jet flow when using the reverser. I really like what you've done so far! It looks great! A few things to consider: The canard elevators are ALWAYS lowered when Viggen lands and taxies. They are basically never raised while on the ground. The RAT always deploys open whenever the gear is down. The control surfaces always droops after landing and engine shutoff, and by the same token the dorsal airbrakes slowly droops down as well, and the inner landing gear doors loosens a few cm as well. I did a more than a few turnarounds with Viggen in the 90:s as a conscript mechanic, even though most of that time was spent with Gripen. Edit: I almost forgot! On the AJ Viggens, the air intake is very flat aluminium.

Thanks a lot! Valom do a TF.5 as well, which bears little to no resemblance to this kit. It's almost like they've learned something during the 15 years that separate them! Thanks buddy! This kits holds all the joys of a Czech short run for sure 😇 I did a Valom Bristol Brigand a few years ago. A much better kit actually... I expect the pace to slow down quite a lot from here on, since I'm expected to work and not have a nice winter vacation

It seems that my 3D printed parts for the rear cockpit is somewhat superfluous now... That Airfix cockpit looks gorgeous though! It also seems that they included a box to hold all the noseweight...

That fin/stab-job was terrific!

We sure can! Whenever it will arrrive though, that's the question! Anyway, I managed to splash a little paint around AK Real Color Interior Grey/green looks a little lighter than other versions I have, but this one sprays a lot easier than Mission Models or Xtracrylix. For protection a quick coat of Gunze GX super clear was used. Together with sufficient amounts of selflevelling thinner this produced an excellent clear finish! With the radiators washed and the oil tanks picked out in black I decided to start gluing the wing together. Guess what? I had to use quite a bit of filler as well... Time to let that harden for a while, before attaching all the sticky out bits.

Its about time that I finish my Classic Airframes example then

Thanks guys! It's kind of fun to beat this kit into submission by any means... I'm pretty sure Clearprop will produce an excellent kit in the near future though!