docdodj

decals ongoing

Painted the missiles, and added more detail painting on the burner can. Finally, glossed the aircraft up. Up next decals and weathering. As a preview, here's where I am so far.

After letting the paint dry, I masked part of the upper part of the deck and applied black as indicated on the original aircraft.

After masking the painted rear, fuselage painted with the ghost grey colors, along with the with the tanks and horizontal fins. Then on to the top gunship grey color.

Painted the rear metal portion, and the exhaust can with tamiya lacquer metallic dark gun metal. One thing about the rear metal portion, it has a slightly bluish hue, which I replicated by applying thin coats of clear blue.

Surface primer sprayed on. I'll be using the smoked canopy, based from references. I just used the clear one, to give an idea what would it look like. Here the smoked canopy is placed on after removing the seam line, polishing and masking.

I now added the missile rails and underwing pylon. The ADF wasn't a mud mover so it usually only carried 2 wing pylons, aside from the rail on the wingtip. One of the things I did was to add magnets to the rails and missiles so I can remove them for painting and decals, and once the kit if finished, if someone knocks of the missiles, it won't be a hair raising event.

Once the tail was fixed, the build of the entire fuselage assembly is almost done. I also added the unique bird slicer antennas of the ADF variant. These parts came from the revell ADF kit. I actually have a kinetic kit part, but the fins looks wrong in shape and size, so simple in appearance it maybe, I used the revell.

measure twice before sanding and trimming down the part. This pointed end was the hardest to do. Broke it of several times, even lost the original point, and had to redo everything all over again, but finally there. And here it is. I know it needs a little clean up, but at least the bulk of work is finished. Based on photos I have seen, the tip of the base of the tail, should crossover a panel line at the deck, and looks like this: The original length was short by around 5 millimeters, and didn't even reached that panel line.

At this point, I noticed the vertical fin base length was short. So I glued a styrene plate on the bottom to lengthen the kit. I used the KASL F-16A fin as measure of how long it should be.

I actually have a unused sprue from a kinetic kit that has the light on the left side. But the fit is short on the tamiya kit, So I decided to use the original part, place a clear sprue with chrome painted behind it to replicate the spotlight on an ADF viper. Checking the size of the decal to be used on the revell tail. Looks ok to me.

Testing my DIY scab plates. May need to resize them a bit larger.

Began the landing gear. If there's on critique of the tamiya kit, it the landing gear. You have to build it all up. This can cause parts to get damaged or knocked off. And you have to either paint this before fully building the kit, then mask it. OR finish the kit, then mask the areas for the paint. I'll be doing the latter.

Once the cockpit is done, on with the fuselage. After much dry fitting, and sanding to fit, I permanently glued on the replacement deck. As you can see, this would be one of the most difficult part. Basically you cut of part of the front with the wings, THEN you also have to save and trim the rear portion of that part to fit. Basically you'll have at least 2 big seams to deal with.

Hi Steve! I'll try and see the settings needed to change the size. I'm usually use just my phone for photos, and upload the directly at imgbb since it provides free hosting