SaminCam

The best colour scheme! This looks fantastic!

Evening all, I've been learning some interesting things about eduard decals and thought people might be interested to see what's going on... The decal sheet for my second spit is eduard own brand, dated 2022, and frankly looks a bit weird with slightly ragged, very obvious carrier film. Somewhere on BM I'd read about these and after a bit of googling decided I'd have a go at removing the film. I've done this on the tail and worked out pretty well so I'm going to show the process on the roundel. First snap, taken a few minutes ago shows the roundel in place using microsol setting solution to help lay down and position and a generous coat of microsol softener brushed on top and left to dry overnight. At the moment it looks pretty bad, visible film and no panel lines or rivets showing through. Hopefully the softener will do its job overnight 👍 More to come tomorrow!

@Watto @bigbadbadge @cpoud117 @mick thanks gents! This week i got most of the decals on DU-J, here you can see it with a gloss coat sealing everything in: Forgive the wobbly prop, it's just placed on atm. In the end I used decals for the wing roundels. They went on whole over the gun ports and then I cut holes out very very carefully with a brand new scalpel, seems to have worked OK! So it's nearly done - I'll add a bit of weathering and a flatter varnish coat then it'll be there. I'm going to move back over to the silver one now and catch it up with the decals. Thanks for dropping by! Sam

Thanks Adrian, I'm not sure about the lights, you'd have thought they'd get switched off once they're on their way?

@bigbadbadge @marvinneko thanks gents! Finer fibre optic wire and 1/48 is the solution for the wing lights, the wing is just so thin in 1/72 out at the tip, it's a difficult trick to pull off. Still going to look cool with the spinning prop! Gloss coat on and decals going down next on both kits, looking forward to this part! Spitfires do look great don't they?!? Cheers, Sam

Thanks @Johnson 🙏, the one true scale!

Good evening! I've been steadily plugging away and this evening, after spraying the green coat, I was delighted to unmask and see a spitfire emerge from under a pile of tamiya tape. Having not seen the engine for a few months I was really pleased to see it remained unscathed after lots of handling and still looks really cool. Next steps are to touch up a few bits of existing paintwork and add the yellow leading edges to the wings. Then it's a gloss coat and finally some decals on both aircraft, I'm looking forward to getting these over the line!

Afternoon all, a little more progress to show on the two spitfires. The underside is painted on the second aircraft: Tamiya medium sea grey, white and rubber black sprayed over the preshading shown in the last post. I've also painted and glued the undercarriage in place so I can sit it up the right way around without damaging the dropped flaps. Next up will be to preshade the topsides and then get the camo pattern sprayed - she's getting there! Cheers, Sam

Good evening! After a few weeks I've got a bit of a progress update for you on the two Spitfires. The silver one has its main paint job finished: Lots of careful masking and never touching with bare hands has worked so far and I seem to have found a good recipe for NMF. This one's nearly ready for decals though I'm tempted to try spraying the roundels - need to get a good method for cutting small round masks though first... The other spitfire with the exposed engine is a bit behind now so going to crack on with painting. Here you can see my first preshade coat on the underside. I'm using my standard method of black base then highlight inside the panel lines- I'll do another pass with a slightly lighter shade of grey then finish off with the top coat of medium sea grey. Life is busy at the moment but hoping to get both of these over the line by Christmas! Cheers, Sam

Afternoon all! I finally have some good progress to report on the second, wheels-up Spitfire. Having tidied up the seams, wing tips and masked up the canopy and wheels, some paint got sprayed. I laid down a thin coat of tamiya rubber black to check the finish and gave this a polish with 6000 grit micromesh. This looked good so I then proceeded to lay down a few coats of Alclad black gloss. This didn't go quite so well - I'm not sure if it was the old (maybe 4 years?) bottle of paint, or if the gloss doesn't like getting sprayed over tamiya acrylic but it wasn't as smooth as I hoped. I considered stripping the whole thing and starting again but instead I've carefully wet polished the whole thing, starting with 3600grit and working up to 12000grit. Here's where I got to - a shiny, black spitfire, which I was about 80% happy with at this point: If I was doing this again I'd probably not using a matt primer like rubber black and also stick to a Tamiya black gloss, rather than using the Alclad base coat. Anyways, after a final polish with a lint free cloth I was ready to shoot some Alclad airframe aluminium this morning. It's a while since I've used my Alclad paints so I gave them a really good shake (with tungsten shot added to the bottle to help) and gave my airbrush a good clean. I sprayed with a 0.3mm nozzle in very light coats at quite high pressure - I'm really pleased with how this has turned out: It's satisfyingly shiny but not too chrome like and once it's had a clear coat I'll mask and pick out the gun cover panels, rudder and elevators with different shades of Alclad to break up the single tone. For the other spitfire (with the exposed engine and gun bays) I'm masking things off and getting ready to start painting the camo pattern. Hopefully I'll have some more progress to show on this soon! Thanks for dropping by, have a great weekend!

Evening all, afraid not a lot to report on the spits. I've been battling a few bits of the build, the main one being the wing tip fibre optics - in the end I've accepted defeat, the wing is just so thin at its end and routing and hiding the fibre, bending it to face forward and fixing it all in place has beaten me. This would probably work in 1/48 or maybe in 1/72 with thinner fibre optic strands - I'll try again on a larger aircraft in the future. This has left me with slightly mangled tips which I've been trying to rescue with sandpaper and filler, nearly there but won't ever look quite as good as it should... One bit of success! No instructions for wheels up with the eduard kit but I managed this without too much bother: Things fit together well without any mods and just need to add a bit of plasticard to cover the hole at the top of the undercarriage (I've already packed out the hole here in preparation). I couldn't see this on any other build threads so thought it might be of interest. Cheers, Sam

Thanks Charlie, he's very relaxed with both hands in his lap! Unfortunately grafting on new arms was beyond my level of skill...

Morning all, glacial progress on the spitfires I'm afraid as not getting much time for modeling. Main task at the moment is tidying up seams and getting small jobs done like painting wheel wells, etc, nothing very exciting to show. Over the weekend, to feel like I was getting somewhere, I painted up an old airfix pilot to go in the wheels up aircraft: He's brush painted, with the harness from the kit PE. It's about the best I can do in the one true scale atm, my favourite bit is the scarf/cravatte...! He sits pretty well in the cockpit and looks OK as long as you don't zoom in too close, ie with the mki eyeball he'll do!

Thanks everyone! Rosie riveter tool used here, I've tried others but get best results with Rosie. I based the pattern on pictures of Eduard 1/48 kit and for each panel draw on pencil lines to check I'm happy with spacing before running over with riveting tool. For a ruler I use "dymo" tape but with tamiya tape stuck to the back so you can re-use a few times before you lose the stick. Hope this helps!

Thanks Bill! Good news is that the fuselage closed up OK and everything fits, the fibre optics are routed to the right places and everything still lights up and spins. One silly slip I made was not checking which way the prop spins - the LEDs in series mean I can't just swap the power cables to change direction. After some deliberation I decided to snip the motor wires in the nose and resolder. This was a bit nerve wracking but worked OK and I managed not to melt any plastic in the process, you can see red to blue and blue to red in the photo below. Next I'm going to get the upper wings on and tidy up seam lines, etc. The fibre optics will need bending and gluing into place and then the lights are going to be finished off with a small blob of uv cure glue. After that I won't be too far off getting some paint down. Cheers, Sam