Tcoat

OK fast progress. The reviews that said this is the best Tamiya aircraft kit made were not kidding! The engineering and detail without having a massive number of small parts is truly amazing. A perfect stress free out of the box project. Even if you are not into Japanese WW2 aircraft this is worth picking up. Sort of sad I am going to close it all up and hide everything with a pilot. May pick up another to leave open. So enough with the sales pitch. Cockpit all done and ready to button up in one evening. Don't think I have ever done that before. Main assemblies Base colour Detail painting and small parts added Black tinted acrylic floor finish for depth Testors Dullcoat to bring it back down. Gauges dotted with Testors clear parts cement for gloss. Perfect fit. Almost all will be invisible in a closed canopy and with a pilot but I will know it is there (and it makes pretty pictures) but it is only about 4 hours of work from start to finish so no time wasted.

Ohhhh you got the GOOD one!

Works best on tweezers that have the serrated edges between the tips to hold the wax better. Takes some experimentation to get the right amount. I find I rarely even use the tweezers on the really small stuff now and only resort to them if there is no way I can fit the pen in the right position.

I learned a trick for dealing with small photoecth parts from my wife. She does this "diamond" painting craft and uses a special tool that uses wax to pick up and place the parts. I stole one with a thing of the wax from her and use the tool or just a bit of the wax on my tweezers when handling the PE and even small plastic parts. My loss rate has dropped about 85% since I started doing this. Maybe it has always been common knowledge but was the first I ever heard of it!

Haven't started the 1/48 sub portion yet but the aircraft is here and the inspiration for the diorama is here I built the F-4 Academy kit a few years back with the intent of doing the same walls you did. I will only have two sides enclosed though. I have the equipment from the Hasegawa set but not the figures since I bought it second hand.

As I said in my Seiran build thread I "accidently" ended up with a ero kit just to get some figures. Since I am waiting for materials anyway I figured I would do a quick build. I plan to do this one in flight so gear up and canopy closed but it will wear the rather battered late war paint job seen in almost every single picture of these aircraft. All the reviews rave about this kit as being on of the best of any aircraft ever so it should be a pretty straight forward event. In case anybody doesn't know what a new(ish) Tamiya kit looks like it is indeed beautiful even on the sprues. It is however also one of the few where there is no gear up optional parts so I am going to have to do some alterations to close it all up.

OK so I gave up trying to find assembled pictures and just filled in the gaps with my imagination. Probably someplace around 30% (optimistically) accurate but looks the part and with paint should be busy enough to be convincing. At least there is little chance of some ex Seiran pilot showing up and telling me it is all wrong! Added extensions to house the fold mech in the horizontal and vertical stabilizers. - Canopy is one piece so I cut the front section off to open. Forgot to take picture but it is the section edged in green (rolled up tape to hold in place and seal gaps for painting). Masked what seemed like 2.6 million glass sections with bare metal foil. Pretty much ready for paint. But... I ordered the Tamiya A6M5 Zero kit to get two of the standing pilot figures for the diorama. Well it showed up today. Which means I now have a Zero that just happens to have to be painted the same colours as the Seiran. Since I may have as much as a three week wait for the tube and rod I ordered to build the Seiran's catapult/storage cradle and there is no sense in loading up the airbrush with the same colours twice then it is time for an

They arrived! Thank you very much. Some are the same as what I have in an old Revell P-61 kit but the ones you sent are molded much much better. The ones in the P-51 are just sort of human shaped lumps. Going to use three of them for ground crew. Just need to remove pockets and such and paint them right. I will probably use one of the aircrew but swap for a Tamiya head. I like the casual pose. Hard to get a decent picture. The Zero kit with figures that I ordered also arrived yesterday. The figures look really nice. These two that you sent me are exciting as I have a F-4 with ground equipment that I have had built on a shelf for a while. Want to do a Vietnam dio but had no figures to populate it. Like this These will work with a couple of Hasegawa navy types I can rework. I shall call them "Whoa back off man I didn't mean it" guy and mister "I wear my sunglasses at night"

I would paint them the same as the background but then give them a slightly darker wash to make them pop.

Looking good but I hope the cat moved!

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens Brown paper packages tied up with strings These are a few of my favorite things Cream-colored ponies and crisp apple strudels Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings These are a few of my favorite things Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes Silver white winters that melt into springs These are a few of my favorite things

I can't speak to the last 40 years but even well into the 80s it was not uncommon to see mixed nationality equipment and supplies in the field. Sometimes you take's what you can get's! Even the word "take" was more frequently accurate than "given" when it comes to some supplies. We as modelers tend to look to the "official" paint, gear, fittings, etc. etc. when the reality (especially in wartime) pretty much anything can go. Appropriation of supplies, field performed "upgrades" and even basic maintenance such as a paint job mean there is likely far more variation than we will ever see in a few pictures. At least that is my excuse when I screw up and do something not by the book!

I will never quite understand the variance in CCTV tech results. At work we have a $50,000 high def , zoomable, state of the art system that if the light is just right and you get the perfect angle you may just be able to tell that the blob 5 meters away is a person. At home I have a $100, wide angle, 720p, doorbell camera that if I just zoom the video (WIFI through internet) I can count the whiskers on a squirrel at 20 meters in the middle of the night. It just makes no sense to me.

The lines of the 262 really do beg to be shown gear up and in flight! Have been wanting to build some in flight (Like Walter I need the shelf space and am running out of folded wing subjects) so that is now on the list.

And the sudden appearance of the big black diamond tail markings on the German aircraft! Had the reverse here of course. Revell, Monogram, AMT, MPC, Lindburg, Renwal and Aurora were all over the place and cheap. Airfix, Frog, Heller, etc showed up now and then but were rare and expensive since the were imports. Only the rich kids got Bandi or Tamiya.

Yes, sorry for causing the side trip down OT Ave. I was just excited to see there was such a kit and that it is actually buildable. I had no clue they made a 1/72 707 until I read this. Oh and I was being facetious about the poor old Canadian planes going straight to scrap. I have no clue about what really happened to them. I will eventually learn that people here often seem to take things literally. Still...

That and the whole 'patina as an art form' and 'as found' movement over the last decade or so. I don't mind the look myself.

Not in Canada it wouldn't!

Beautiful build so far, even with the issues! Wish I had never seen this thread though since now I am on a quest for a 1/72 707. Bot my wife will be POed at this one. Wasn't even on my radar (no pun intended) before. I spent 6 days on a Canadian Forces CC-137 flying from Trenton Ontario to Lahr Germany back in '77. Boarded the aircraft in Trenton and it took off and immediately headed west. You don't need to know much about geography to know that west is not the proper direction for Europe from Canada. We stopped at every major city and airbase between Ontario and British Columbia then turned around and did the same thing all the way back to Trenton. THEN we went east and after many other stops eventually made it to Germany. Sooooo ... I would love to build this kit as a CC-137 since I was so intimate with one for so long. I may even still have the travel orders around which will give me the number of the flight and airframe. (which is probably made into soup cans by now). They even make a decal set for 1/72!

I was at a big annual car show a couple of years ago. Gone were the days when they were all shiny and sleek. Of the 200 or so cars there I bet 160 of them looked just like this model. Most even had a coat of sealer over them to keep them looking just like that. Little did I know back in 1993 that my hand rolled coat of primer with the rust bleeding through would one day be the "cool" look!

That is what I am going for. Or at least a basic resemblance. My biggest concern is the actual fold mech. Since all the pictures show it disassembled there appears to be something missing. The hinge sections are evident but I have no idea what actually moves the wings. Since they were oil pressure operated there should be some sort of cylinders that moved it up and then back but none of the pictures include such things. What I probably need to do is just stop looking at the pictures and just leave my imaginary actuating arm as is.

I don't suppose anybody has seen a picture of the wings on these things actually folded hidden away in the recesses of the internet or a book? I am sort of second guessing the arrangement I used and don't want to proceed until I convince myself that it is close enough.

I used it on some kits that have survived over 30 years but it may have been a more synthetic type of thread. MAy also be the difference between brushing some on and soaking it in it. I will bow to the expert on this though and retract my recommendation.