Parrahs

That's a lot of 1/72 missile tossers. Let's see which ones actually show up, hopefully the lot but I have a feeling my long longed for 1/700 Belfast is still sitting there over in the boat section marked as a new release.

That certainly sounds like the GWH F-15J I built.

Looking at the Hasegawa kit in the box surface detail isn't as extensive as GWH and probably a tad softer too. Some flash around the wing-tips, suggesting it's a bit behind there as well. No idea about fit for Hasegawa, while the GWH was overall quite good though with some minor hiccups. Until we get to the intakes that is, at which point it fell down an open manhole cover and got stuck in a fatberg. On the plus side you get separate parts for the intakes in their up and down positions, supposedly that's rare. Slide-moulded single piece nose-cone was nice on GWH, and you got a full set of Sparrow and AAM-3 missiles. I barely used any GWH decals, but I've heard some complaints about them being quite thick. The Hasegawa kit I plundered had Cartograf decals.

A lot of decals later... and a quick hit with a diluted oil wash. With that there was little left but hoping for the best, slapping on some varnish, and final assembly. And the result...

So the result of Are here. In short, GWH's 1/72 F-15J with decals nicked from a Hasegawa kit since I wanted to build the GWH kit, but I also wanted the Nagano nose art. Along with an (almost) Greek F-16 for size.

That I can remember from building mine the front-aft fuselage joint and the extender ring (that it seems the box art forgot) the JA had there was indeed the filler-hungriest bit on the outside of the aircraft. I have no memory of the intake trunking calling for anything much, but I may just have ignored that as not sufficiently visible to be worth the bother (contrary to the real thing I won't be crawling through it). Looking at the finished kit I do see a step that kinda sorta oughta have been taken care of between the intake parts and the trunking part. The clear parts for the wing lights didn't fit all that well for me either, so dry fit those and be prepared to fiddle a bit with them. As a little tangent for those who care, the different camo schemes for Viggen were due to the different variants and their different missions. The mostly green splinter for the strike and recon birds that would be stealing clotheslines and ploughing fields as they went past and two-tone grey for the fighters up high. But painting all the fighters in their own camo was apparently seen as making things a bit too easy on the enemy, and so to keep them guessing a few of the fighters were also dressed up in the low-altitude camoflage.

Some fixing later. That's better. Maybe even a touch much contrast between the greys? Then again panel lining and decals will serve to make that a bit less noticeable, so this should be perfectly serviceable (I hope). Looking ahead, this doesn't seem all that helpful. Oh well, Hasegawa decals makes this a non-issue. Also, that's a lot of stencils,

On to painting then. Starting out with the baggage, which I pretty much took straight to "needs a final coat of varnish" in one go. Do compare the length of the front decal for the sparrows in the instructions and on the missiles, since the width was just about right to wrap them around I'm guessing the manual is wrong and they didn't give me 1/48 decals for that one bit, but... Moving on to the aircraft itself, I basically pre-shade up with a somewhat mottled coat from black And then blend it all together. After maksing off the bits that are to be this darker grey I hit the excess of it with a tough of black to give a black base again, then then mottle it up. And... [Very colourful Swedish language] On the easy side of things the two greys ended up a bit more similar than expected, but re-mask this bit, mix in some white and that'll be taken care of. The black lines on the other hand... I thought I was very careful to extend the first grey out way past where it should be, and then put all of the masking on top of it rather than out on the black. Did I really manage to squish out the putty this much with handling? Or could the black perhaps somehow have dissolved the putty a bit and made it squish itself? A sneak peak at a horisontal surface suggests it isn't the latter. Regardless, the plan now is to lighten up the light grey a bit, then carefully and bit by bit mask off the lighter grey and cover up the black bits with the darker grey. Until next time, chirp chirp

I thought I'd build an Eagle. Looking around a bit I found a Hasegawa boxing with some nose art I liked (one of the Mystic Eagle ones). On the other hand I've heard a lot of really good things about GWH. And so I went with the "a certain kind of madman" option and will be building the GWH plane with Hasegawa's decals. Luckily I have my man in Tokyo so I could get the Hasegawa kit at Japanese prices and no shipping. Starting out the cockpit tub is the usual fare for the pilot's side of things, while the electronics pit behind him is built up with front and rear bulkheads and side wall parts. Unfortunately the side walls and rear bulkhead wouldn't play along nicely with each other at all. The instructions aren't exactly clear on how to fit them to each other, and fiddling with the parts there simply didn't appear to be any right way at all to do it. Also note part X2. There are no holes for its pegs on V3, V7, W1 or T2. The only place where such can be found is right on the face of V1. But there you also have some wiring going across, right between the holes, so X2 wouldn't want to seat there either. Luckily the plan was to build things canopy down anyway, so this will all be hidden, and some test fitting showed me that it wouldn't get in the way of the fuselage either. The more attentive may notice here that we appear to have parts from five different sprues (V, W, X, T and F) just for the cockpit. Which is indeed the case. Plus sprue R for the seat. GWH seems to go approach sprues much like Flyhawk does, ie having a huge number of small sprues in a kit. For this kit you get 21 different sprues, five of which you get doubles of, so 26 sprues in total. Keep the sprue map handy... Some paint later I had planned to use Hasegawa decals for everything but the missiles (since Hasegawa as usually didn't include any), but as it turned out they and GWH had some rather diverging ideas about how big an F-15 instrument panel is. So it's full GWH decals inside. They were reasonably well behaved. Main fuselage and wings fit together nicely. Upper fuselage and wings are in one part, no no seams to worry about. Nice surface detail as well. Some fo the joints between this main piece and the lower wing parts, well, they did fit nicely but I mostly just got this feeling that there were balancing just on the edge of turning into a real mess. [Colourful Swedish language] Happily it buffed out. The front fuselage also closed up nicely around the cockpit. Some good use of having panels both for extra detailing on the top/bottom and to cover the main seam. Though once again we get to some oddities with the manual. See, you get a full radar and can build things with the nose open. But if you do the nose closed up as per the manual you get this: Now if you just clip off the tabs there it all fits nicely, but the manual never tells you that. Single piece slide-moulded nose btw. Slide moulding was also used to give us single piece AAM-3 and Sparrows. Gas bags were the usual two piece affair, and did require a bit of filler. When it came to stuff the front fuselage into the main body the fit wasn't quite brilliant. And then it was time for the intakes (provided in both up and down positions). Oh dear.The horizontal gap is of no concern, that'll be covered by another piece, but the vertical one is right out in the open. And even getting things to this state required a significant amount of brute force. And with this not being quite aligned the bit that plugs into the holes here (the gun and its cover on this side) won't match up with the wing root bit either. That was pretty easily solved though by just clipping off the pegs and matching it against the wing root. All of that taken care of it was pretty smooth sailing for the rest of the pre-paint assembly.

BP-3 has the forward pylons with launch rails, but no launch rails for the belly or underwing pylons. I'm not sure if the underwing pylons themselves change for the sidewinder (apart form adding the launch rail), what's in the kit would fit the Falcon's but IMO doesn't quite look like what's in the images over at https://lae.blogg.se/2016/october/fox-two-svedala-sidewinder-kommer-till-sverige.html

Nice. That's a subject I've been thinking of building, and the current crop of models (in my preferred scale at least) did leave some to be desired...

That's really good news. And the more potential makers for a 1/700 HMS Belfast the better, well, assuming one of them finally gets around to it...

Well, apart form somewhat delayed... Main coat of paint on, as well as some sprayed on fading. Decals, panel lining, a bit of tank style oil streaks&fading all went quite well. Decals were mostly from Moose Republic (the roundel supplied with the kit being absolutely horrendous, thus saving me from finding out how well they had stood the test of time) with an extra sharkmouth and numerals from Maestro Models. Then it was time for a gloss varnish. In a few spots that decided not so much to turn frosty as it dried, but rather to turn into milk the moment it hit the model. By and large this led to some re-painting which all in all may not have been the worst thing as it helped bring about a more patchwork look, but sadly one of the wing roundels also got affected a bit. In the end, this is where it ended up: The sharkmouth (maybe more of a boar with those teeth?) is pretty unique on Swedish aircraft, the air force has been extremely restrictive about such things by and large since WW2 ended. It was apparently found underneath the regular paintjob when the plane came in for repainting, and permission was given to restore it as long as it was then painted over again before the aircraft left the hangar. It's also only on the right side, nothing on the left.

Having passed through grading season and some time away from everything, a bit of progress has happened. First the scribing was finalized and just about everything from the kit was glued in place, followed by the expected filling and whatnot. Not a lot more to see there beyond the previously dry-fitted photos though, so moving on to the bombs. These were sawn off from the casting blocks and then sanded down the last bit. Quite carefully, given the ring at the end of them. The pylons have also been, hm, approximated might be a suitably diplomatic way of putting it. Thankfully the glue bit into things very well so they attached with a minimum of fuzz. I then slobbered on some black primer, and have now gotten so far as to mottle up the to-be-green bits. We'll see how much of what contrast there is remains once the top coat is on, I may go and mottle over the alternate under-colour parts first to have less contrasts in the amount of contrast so to say, as well as the XF-62 covers it's probably challenge enough to not have it just fully cover the main areas without having to worry about blending in those panels to a suitable amount form the current look.

With the fuel tank being somewhat optional and perhaps not the most graceful bit of equipment I'll make do without. The complete lack of ordnance and pylons for the same is a bit worse in my eyes, and will be taken care of to varying degrees.

I tend to get mostly noise then, still trying to figure out how to whip the camera into submission.

I suspect the nose didn't end up entirely straight, and as a result the under-nose bit that decides if it's an A32A or an S32C (the latter supplied as a clear part) didn't end up fitting very well. (Wings somewhat dry-fitted here). With the inner curvature this ended up being the worst part for filler and sanding. Otherwise filling in various gaps was pretty quick and easy since I didn't need to worry about preserving surface detail. There's also some sinkage here and there, such as by the tail. And as promised above, a quick look at the cockpit. Not a terrible lot going on, but slap on the glass... and I think that's about what's needed. Adding the red bit to the seats seems like it was a good idea though, since those are very visible. Also note the square studs along the fuselage aft of the cockpit. Being raised those seemed like the bit of surface detail I'd have a bother keeping around, but looking at various photos I can't find them on real aircraft. That simplifies things. Anyway, with all that sorted it's time for scribing. I've gotten started somewhat, mostly using a Tamiya scriber followed by some PE saw blades. I'm mostly using Dymo marking tape, the thick kind to be embossed, for guidance, with some regular Tamiya flexible masking tape for the more complex curves. Given how little I know what I'm doing I guess it's going ok-ish, though a number of foul language generators have had to be filled in with Mr Surfacer already.

It's a bit of a mixed bag for me so far. Apart from the fuselage warping and its effects things are going quite well, the cockpit and engine slotted into place very nicely. The fuselage has done more than just bend apart though, resulting in a good deal of filler being needed here and there. As I'm writing I'm realizing that adding a bunch of plasticard tabs to help the rare few locating pegs would probably have been a good idea. I'll be going with a later paint scheme, so that's one mess I won't have to step in.

So I have Gripen, Viggen, Draken and Tunnan standing in the cabinet, so time for probably the least well known of SAAB's famous(?) five: Aircraft 32 Lansen. The plane itself is probably the most normal and conservative of the five, and to the ebst of my knowledge didn't really push any cutting edge technology or go for some original solution to things. Created in the late 40's and early 50's to replace a range of WW2 vintage aircraft (SAAB 18 and 21, Mosquito) the first version to show up was the A32A attack/strike aircraft. This as followed by the J32B, an all-weather fighter with new engine, guns and avionics, and then the S32C which a recon version of the A32A, swapping the guns for cameras. Later on a number of J32B were rebuilt to J32D target tugs and J32E electronic warfare aircraft. For this build I had a bit of a dilemma. Available kits in my preferred scale was a not quite fresh A32A/S32C Heller kit showing its age in more ways than just the raised panel lines, and the much newer but reportedly still not all that brilliant Tarangus more-or-less-short-run J32B kit. The latter did seem like a better idea, but I'd rather build an A32A. I could probably mostly fix the nose, but the engine was probably a bit much for me. Then as I was flopping around with other aircraft I kept having the idea that I really should get some solid panel line re-scribing practice in. And so I think you see where this is going, Heller it is. The whole thing arrived in a bag, with the staples holding the card top in place being heavily rusted. What am I doing to myself... A first check of the fuselage Oh dear. But it should be workable even without the bench vice if I just take it section by section. The canopy seems quite clear, once I buffed out the scratches from banging about in the bag for a decade or three. It's tank armour thick though, so no reason to bother all too much with the cockpit (which has details, though quite soft and faint such). A quick additionw as amde though, as these will be bright reed pieces sitting right under the canopy and their absence thus easily missed. A quick cockpit paint-job later (I guess I should point a camera in there at some point before the canopy goes on) and the part by part gluing gets going. Starting with the upper rear. That done I glued the wings (single underside and separate uppers) together and dry fitted some assorted bits together. Well, that's an aircraft. Now if only the gaps were as benign as it looks in the photo.

Rebell.com have Gunze (Mr Color), Alfahobby.se carry Xtracrylics, and both have Mr Paint.

I'll keep that in mind for the future. It isn't too unlikely that I'll return to the subject one day, and better sights would be one of the big things then.

It does seem like good "aftermarket decals bait" as everyone wants one in their local airfield's livery. Or at least I do.

A Bofors 37mm from Ace, 40mm Bofors on an English carriage and a Flak 36 with the latter two from Zvezda. A quick little project between one that wasn't and one that probably won't be.

So, built them up and slapped on some primer. The 40mm continued the theme from the 88 with a pretty substantial mould ridge to be removed from most things. Now with all this done I took another look at the solid discs trying to be the sights of the 40mm, and decided that even I could probably touch it up a bit. So off with those and out with the brass wire. Actually filling in the spider webs on the other hand seems like it'd likely just end up a mess. So off to paint. And there we are, all glossed up for the wash.

Isn't 2020 a tad late for that?