Ngantek

Gunze lacquers and primers do dissolve into IPA (in fact I use it to strip these paints), so I would tend not to. If you're very careful and use only the lightest touch of ipa, it might work out well, but a wet cloth and a little pressure will go straight through. You could use just a damp (in water) cloth perhaps? Let me know how it goes! Andy

Fantastic as always Mark. Your trademark razor sharp finish and subtle highlighting and shading are absolutely on point. Andy

This continues apace, not that I expected anything different! The nacelle assembly was fiddly or just needed some cleanup? Looking great though! Andy

Lovely build and diorama! Great work on the mottle! The only thing missing is some lower angle photos! Andy

Astonishing work!

144!?!! nawwww

Thanks for the link. Looks great! I'm looking forward to having a read in order to shamelessly steal all the good ideas!

Well I got most out from under the cockpit; at least on one side. It looks like it wasn't that packed in actually, so hopefully the stuff on the inaccessible and smaller cavity on the other side is similarly uncompressed. The weights have had a wash in water, but I can't seem to shift the PVA that has filled in the gaps (rather like pacman mouths) so am debating whether this is enough of an expansion risk to just use some fresh stuff. Maybe I'll see if there's any change after a night's soak. Perhaps I'll try with CA; it certainly would be easier to work with!

Oh what a great subject this turned out to be! I was just thinking, looking through the first post, 'perhaps I could build one in FAA EDSG over sky...'. The chances resisting temptation on this one are looking pretty low I'd say!

Yeah dunno, I'm just piling it all in there and hoping at this point! Wow good job on that! It's a bit of a squeeze isn't it? I suppose there's some space in the forward cockpit area that might be a more sensible use of space... Glad to have you Colin. Hopefully I won't bugger it up too much! Speaking of which... The Oh crikey, thanks for the heads up Chris. I'm sure I came across this approach randomly trawling though build logs and must've filed it away subconsciously as 'the way to do it'. But as you say, reading around shows it to be a dodgy approach. I didn't even consider it, since pva is 'kids glue' I assumed it must be entirely inert. CA also seems to draw a few red flags so any suggestions? I could use Epoxy. The front cavity I can get at, behind the cockpit has room to expand, but the concern is under the cockpit. Possibly I could remove the styrene plate that I put in, and can poke at least some of it out, I'll have a try later.

Hello all, here's a build log of Revell's reboxing of Cyber Hobby's much maligned Sea Vixen kit. It's one of the first kits I picked up on returning to the hobby, ticking the boxes of being a favourite aircraft in a modern tooling that by all accounts builds beautifully. Also, wanting to try as broad a range of of different manufacturers, the dragon/CH style was something I was keen to check out. Of course that was before I saw how unfavoured it was for its many accuracy issues; but undaunted, I thought I'd plough on regardless with my fingers in my ears and hopefully still achieve something totally OOB that looked sufficiently Sea Vixeny on the shelf, while having a lovely easy time doing it. That didn't quite go to plan however! Having a fondess for carrier borne FAA aircraft, I tend to build them wings up if I can. I shows off the uniquely naval character of the design, and has the added bonus of saving some of the the little space I have. That was the plan with this one until I acquired a copy of Airfix's 1/48 kit. That will certainly require a wings-up build, so for variety and to show of the the lovely profile of the type, I thought I'd instead build this one wings out, everything down in landing configuration. This gives me a lot more freedom to be very lazy on the internal detail! Of course it also means building the canopy closed which (as you can see from the box art) has a dodgy kink in it that I was hoping to hide by posing it open, but you can't win them all. Further to differentiate the two, I thought it would be nice to build one as a FAW1, which has nicer lines to my eye. The Revell kit is in a much better position to make this conversion, since the CH tool has the FAW1 wing boom shape moulded into the wings, with the FAW2 shoulder extensions added on an additional runner. There will of course be numerous other changes that need making, but I'm going to be lazy try not to make too big a deal about it. So we'll call it a FAW1.5. I've actually been nibbling away at this one for months, a tiny bit at a time, but finally it's moved up on the build list to get a little more attention, so this first post will be something of a catch up. Apologies for the lack of pictures, I haven't really been documenting it much. Inital pokes at the cockpit showed it to be very much an abstraction of the real thing. One of the quirkier aspects of the aircraft is of course the side by side seating arrangement. The kit has no opening between the two, so I started by cutting out the gap between the detail. On breaking through to the other side, you realise that nothing really lines up. The seats too, are bizarrely way out of size (apparently 1/100 scale). It's probably a good thing that I changed my mind and decided not to pose the two cockpits open then. In the end I poked around with a knife, added a nice Barracuda resin Martin Baker seat for the pilot (in my stingyness, I decided to keep the 2nd one in the pack for a future build, since the observer side will be all but invisible), and ended up with this. You can see how out of size the kit seats are... The pilot's didn't even protrude above the fuselage. It's all going to be invisible, so I really haven't laboured the point much as you can see. It seems to have taken an aged to finally close up the fuselage. The main sticking points (aside from the above) have been the modification of the observer's cockpit bubble from FAW2 to FAW1 and the addition of nose weight. On the former, the bubble filed down fairly easily, but then came the decision on how to fill it. I was originally going to try with CA and talc, but then realised that clear runner included the hood for CH's FAW1 kit as well. However, this turns out to be a rather bizarre shape: A fair amount of modification of both the clear part and the fuselage yielded this: Now of course one only has to look at the real thing to see that this is off quite significantly, but seeing as there's a ridge to mark the window moulded into the part, it would require some delicate sanding an re-polishing to correct. So, in the spirit of not getting too bogged down, I left it there and blundered on. Masked and underpainted in black, hopefully the effort to fit the clear part will yield a slightly better look. The hole on the pilot's side has come back a bit to make space for the larger seat, but there's not whole lot of space under the hood. Incidentally, you can see some dimples around the area, which unusually mate up with stubs in the canopy pieces. Clearly, the model is not designed to have the cockpit posed open, despite being in two pieces. Now for noseweight. I am slightly tempted to leave it out entirely, since with a bit of stiffness in the lowered tailhook, I may be able to just let it flop into a 'just touched down' pose; but somehow I felt obliged to do my due dilligence. The instructions ask for an entirely unrealistic 25g in the nosecone, which filled with lead shot, can only hold 10g. I assume they mean total of 25g wherever you can fit it. In any case, once pointed out, I couldn't see past the rather dodgy kit nose shape. It's bit like Gandalf's in that respect! So out with an Aires quickboost replacement, and some rejigging of the calcs. The heavier resin nose doesn't help actually; since it only adds about 4.5g at the furthest point, where you might otherwise fit 10. A guestimate of the position of the (forward canted) rear wheels and some quick testing of how much lead split shot would fit into each cavity suggests that 25g in the nose equates to about 33g elsewhere: In the end, there's lead shot and PVA all under the cockpit, and up the rear firewall, and more to come in the cavity behind the nosecone. Given I've based my calcs on requiring all of the 25g in the nosecone (which seems basically impossible), I think that should probably be way more than enough. Famous last words! So there we are, fuselage and wings all buttoned up (the fit throughout has been really excellent actually) and various bits of grey and metallic painted in all the appropriate internal bits, hopefully we're not a million miles away from paint! Hopefully more progress in the not-too-distant future. Thanks for looking in! Please feel free to let me know what modifications to FAW1 or (relatively low effort) remedies to CH's errors that I have missed! Cheers, Andy

Yeah I tend to mix up at least a good chunk of a 10ml bottle; but generally inherent in that is that it's a colour you'll use a reasonable amount of over time. I find mixing enough of a faff, that I'd rather waste paint than have to do it multiple times unnecessarily. Added to that, I assume each mix will come out at least slightly differently, so I'm keen to make sure any further coats or repair work come from the same original mix. But yeah I've been weighing them, so don't listen to me!

Yay what a treat! Looking forward to seeing how this kit turns out.

Thanks. Yeah I'd forgotten this. I tend to agree with @Troy Smith, xf21 has a muddiness that can't be cleared with just white. I quite like Casey's mix and colourcoats, again just a matter of taste. Here's hoping on Humbrol, it's a shame to see so many colours go from the enamel range if rumours are true. I did pick up another tin of each anyway!

Interesting. I didn't realise it could be so much. Entirely handwavium, xf8 does seem on the thin side, which would I suppose lead to overblue mixes. It is also one of the less muddy of the tamiyas. Sorry to misrepresent the mix, I'll remix and overspray when I get the chance to see how it changes.