alxzinbox

Cockpit Corrections: The three main issues with the cockpit were HUD too high displacing the windscreen Ejection seats sitting too low lack of detailing on the bulkhead behind the RIO Thanks to the inputs from Tony Oliver, I cut into the Pilot IP Hood and inserted the HUD. It fit quite well, matches reference, and the windscreen clear part sits perfectly. Raising the Ejection seats was a simple enough affair- I used 2mm styrene card underneath the seats boosting them up a bit.In references the cushion is level with the side consoles. Although I've raised them a tad higher, it won't be noticeable once the cockpit is closed in, and more importantly, the seats look correct in profile now. I added a representation of circuit breakers on the rear bulkhead behind the RIO. I scribed cross hatch lines into a 0.5mm styrene sheet, sanded it down to smooth the scores, cut out chunks and applied a black wash to it after cementing it on. Some detail better than none... I think that about wraps up the cockpit. The sidewalls on the fuselage will get some minimal treatment as nothing much is seen. I also realised that the cockpit is missing the cable that is connected to the unit on the RIO hood. I'm in two minds whether to join the halves together and continue with the build, or start detailing the Nose Gear Bay next as there is no detail on the side walls. It seems enticing to attempt it, but at the same time, the length of the project is going to increase given the rate I procrastinate at. Anyways, we'll know soon enough. Thanks for watching! Alex.

Jaw dropping weathering!! Perfect advertising material for these kits.

Amazing! Some fine paint work you've achieved. A tiny vignette would be perfect for this build. Cheers, Alex

Look good!! The photography compliments the model very well too. Cheers, Alex.

for a moment I though that the cockpit was part of the kit. Great work on the scratch building and painting! Looking forward to your progress. ~Alex

She's beautiful!!! Inspirational stuff!

Beautiful build!!! The landing gear bay detailing is really cool!

On my build, I noticed on dry-fitting the cockpit with the ejection seats installed, they sit too low in the cockpit. Are you facing a similar issue? I'm looking forward to the weathering on your builds. Your preshading and highlighting looks very promising!

Thanks Bill! Hobbyboss has some moulded on detail to represent the canvas, but lacking much texture or the folding of canvas, I thought I could explore the tissue paper and PVA route Regarding the rear bulkheads, I'll have a pass on it this weekend. Doesn't make sense to detail up the cockpit and leave a gaping black hole in that area. Thanks for the extra nudge to push things along! Those are some awesome pointers Tony!! Much appreciated. A dry fit confirmed it. I had flushed the entire HUD area with thin cement, so the HUD is pretty much a goner. Fortunately, HB has provided two, although it might be worth exploring the acetate option from the dreammodel set. I'll probably go with the 2nd option to fixing the HUD issue. From references it seems like the HUD is placed in an insert in the IP hood, so some surgery might be required (which I'm not really looking forward to). Another point to rectify is how low the seats fit in the cockpit. Should have been pretty obvious when the pilot's seat was lower than the RIO's IP hood. Oh well... The seats were the same size as the kit's offering, although in references I now notice that the seat is in line height-wise with the side consoles, while they are a little lower in the model. Fortunately I haven't glued them down yet, so that should be an easy fix, although they still won't be as high as in the real aircraft. Thanks again Bill and Tony for your inputs! Cheers, Alex.

Coming along great John! Love the detailing on the cockpit! I have two in the stash, this will be a handy thread to when I finally get around to building them!

Cockpit So it's been a slow two weeks on the build. I did get around to completing the 2nd ejection seat (detailing, painting, decals and photoetch), and moved on to installing the cockpit PE. Started off by spraying NATO black over the IP hoods and the IPs themselves Stuck the small parts on a candy stick using BluTac. Used tissue paper and PVA glue to create the canvas covering on the IP hoods. Seems a little out of scale to be honest. Installing the PE took a little detailed work to cut out the screen transparencies from the acetate sheet and glue them into place on the IP. There were holes drilled for the dials, so the acetate sheet could be stuck on the backside of the PE. Not so lucky on the screens which were not etched out of the metal plate. I matte coated the PE before installing the acetate sheets for that extra contrast between the reflective and the matte. Hobby boss didn't provide any sidewall detail on the fuselage halves, and TBH, nothing much is seen at the scale esp with the closed canopy. I was initially planning on detailing the bulkhead behind the RIO, but maybe I'll get to they sometime in the future if ever. So here are the pictures of the completed cockpit,. Thanks for watching! As always, your critique and suggestions are welcome and appreciated. Cheers, Alex.

Very inspirational stuff Parabat! I'm picking up a pointer or two.

That's a great looking Super Tomcat! My favourite choice of scheme as well

A very interesting choice of subject! Nice work on the radiator and the panel lines of the prototype. Have you tried RB's riveter? It's pretty awesome for 72nd scale.

Thanks Parabat! Thanks Dermot! Hi Tony! I've been following your build since you started it. I have been referencing it a lot during my build as well. The Tomcats are shaping up nicely! Quite a challenge you took up there with all six of them. I appreciate your very generous offer, but I'll probably have to take a rain check on it as I live in India, and the cost of shipping the parts over will cost a bomb, and might not be feasible for this current build. Cheers, Alex.

Ventral Fins with NACA ducts: Thanks to the discussion intiated by Navy-Bird in the comments above, I decided to reproduce the NACA ducts using styrene card instead of going down the complicated route of casting it from the Hasegawa kit. I started off with the basic dimensions and hand drawn outline for the ducts on 0.3mm styrene card Using a new blade, carving out the duct was pretty easy. I further refined the shape after detaching the fin from the rest of the card. I then glued the fin on to a 0.5mm card. As per the kit dimensions, the base of the fin measured 1mm in thickness. So the final thickness of 0.3 + 0.5 = 0.8mm should look reasonably passable in scale. I made the blunder of gluing the first card the wrong way the first time. Fortunately steps 1,2 & 3 were pretty simple to replicate (took around 5 minutes each time), so no love lost. After the cement had completely cured overnight, 15 minutes of sanding the edges to a keen edge (with reference lines drawn on to the fins) and the result was looking pretty good already. And finally here is the end result (not attached to the fuselage) with the original for comparision. Added the panel on the inner starboard fin, along with riveting. Some filler will still be required along the tips, which will hopefully be solved by the Mr. Surfacer 500 (which is still in transit over surface mail- also required to complete the landing gear) Building both the fins took little over 2-2.5 hours in total (including mistakes, stretched over two days), and adds a nice additional level of detail to the build. Thanks Navy-Bird once again for bringing this detail to my attention! Cheers, Alex.

That's great stuff! I like the base- simple in concept, yet plenty of detail. Cheers, Alex.

Thanks Milktrip! These are HO scale cows (slightly smaller than 1/72) from aliexpress.com. Link: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/50pcs-HO-Scale-Model-UnPainted-White-Farm-Animals-Cows-9-Poses-1-87/32584365361.html?spm=2114.01010208.0.231.5drHRe Thanks Cliff!

Thanks Bill. As Parabat mentioned, it's missing in this HB kit as well. It would have been nice if they provided the fins as a separate piece instead of moulding it to the fuselage. Then again, lots of details that one would take for granted in a Hasegawa offering are missing in the kit, thus all the scratch building. Well, that's a viable alternative. A friend has the Hasegawa kit. Will attempt a similar procedure on this build if scratch building a fin from styrene sheet doesn't work. Resin Casting seems to be a very handy skillset to have in the inventory.

Thank you ArmoredSprue, Modelglue and Val! Yes, the kit has both the high and low vis schemes, with separate stencils for both. There's also a third scheme for a VF-31 Tomcatters, you can have a look at the decal sheet above.

That's a good looking aircraft. The instrument panel especially turned out great. I assumed till now that pastels were exclusively for armor, but you have proven otherwise. Your chipping is fantastic too! Hairspray technique?

Thank you Rom1, Air-to-Air and Giorgio! ------- Ejection Seat Detailing As I wait for the arrival of some consumables needed to complete the landing gear, I decided to start on the SJU-17 Ejection seat. The kit offering is devoid of any representation of the rocket motor systems, as well as missing the very prominent canopy smasher horns on the headrest. I started off by making a small cradle for easy manipulations during detailing, paint and decal application. The seats are held on by blu-tac The lower portion of the EJ seat seemed to be pretty well detailed to not require any upgrades. Also, I didn't want to spend time on something that would be hidden inside the cockpit. I sawed off the top half, and decided to redo that portion. I used 0.3mm styrene card to fashion out the canopy smasher horns. Instead of cutting two sets for either side, I glued a piece of card over another using water soluble PVA glue. I could then cut out the shape and end up with two identical parts of the same. A quick dip in water is sufficient to separate the parts. The bulk of the head rest was made from three 1.3mm styrene cards stuck together, cut and sanded into shape. These are the parts for the first assembly. The rails and rocket motor was made from 0.5mm strips and a 1mm thick stretched sprue. The headrest support was made from 1.3mm styrene card, and shaped using a round needle file. Stretched sprue was used to make the rest of the parts on the rear and sides of the seat. After finishing the detailing, the seat looks like a pretty good improvement over the kit's offering. After paint Decals and Dream-model PE. There is a considerable gap between the PE head-rest plate and the head-rest. Realised it only after transferring the photos from the camera. It's going to be difficult to fix as I have liberally applied CA glue in multiple places around the harness etc. A bummer for sure, especially as it fit well during dry-tests. So that's the result from a labor of two days. I didn't work on both the seats simultaneously, as I didn't want to make the same mistakes twice. Hindsight is 50-50 and lessons learned on the pilot's seat will make the RIO's seat all that much easier. Atleast, that's the theory. Thanks for watching, and as always, your critique, suggestions and tips are welcome and appreciated. Cheers, Alex.

Beautiful! The selective paneling and shading looks really nice.

Hi Raven, I'm guessing it's probably a little too late for the gear-bay issues, but you can probably use the same open bay doors provided in the kit in future builds. The sanding required to get a good fit would be much less that what you're currently faced with. What kind of filler are you using currently? Since you're having less that ideal results with your sanding sticks, I would probably head out to a hardware depot and get 800, 1000 and 1200 grit sand paper You can then superglue strips to a ice-candy stick and voila- brand new cheap sanding sticks. Start with the 800 and work your way up to 1200. The extra effort will be worth it. Cheers, Alex.

It's so rewarding to see the builds coming to life slowly. Great going so far! Cheers, Alex.