Nik W

Hi Calum, Cracking build here mate. love the look of the bare metal undersides. Quick question for you, I'm in the process of building a couple of Lightnings myself, an F6 and a T5, and I'm having the same issues with getting an appropriate degree of dihedral on the wings. How did you go about getting yours to 'droop' suitably? I've had the wings on the F6 and I have to agree with you Airfix seemed intent on it having wings level! Great work on eliminating the centre seam on the belly by the way, that things a real bar-steward! Regards, Nik

Do you do requests? If so more Lightnings please! Superb pictures! Nik

Evening all! Little while since my last update on this, mainly due to having to help my girlfriend move into a new flat and also because of a week or so of having no inspiration to model at all. But progress has been made, slowly but surely. First up, thanks to John for his advice regarding the positioning of the missile pylons. Based on some scale drawings I found in the back of a Lightning datafile book I've got (typical I'd only find out I had the info all along AFTER I'd asked the question though) these were drilled out and filed to shape to accept the kit pylons. They're a little rough and ready, but the holes are completely hidden once the pylons are in place. The next and most time consuming part was modifying the wings to accept the CMK resin undercarriage bays. Before After Started this off by snipping off the undercarriage bay walls with some sprue snippers then scraping what I couldn't cut off with the flat end of an old modelling file. Fitting these required serious amounts of plastic to be shaved out of the roof of the wing and some very heavy thinning of the bottom half of the wing so that the two halves join up fairly neatly. Rather than spend what could've been weeks scraping with files, scratching with scalpels and then sanding the appropriate thickness, I took a fairly bold step in order to move things along and attacked the roof of the wing with the dremel with a sanding bit attached. This shifted the plastic way quicker than I could ever have done the other way, and with a small amount of tidy up has produced some pretty good results. The wings are a little 'bulgy' because I couldn't thin the plastic any further without going straight through or the resin parts without risking losing the undercarriage bay ceiling, but its not too noticeable unless you look at the wings head on. Lastly for this fairly picture heavy update was the cable ducting on the side of the T5. Because the Eduard kit is based on the F1/F1a/F2, this doesn't come moulded on like the F6/F2a kit, and so a small problem appears after fitting the main ducting. The ducting comes in two parts (big long bit, and shorter front parts to create accurate early Mk cable ducting) but because of the common parts between the sprues for all marks of Lightning, also provided are the longer front ducting parts needed to make a T5. Because these longer parts are meant to be used on the F6/F2a kit (which has moulded on 'big long bits' - technical term there.... ) when you add these to the front of the 'big long bits' they come far too far forward along the fuselage by about 1.5cm. The drawing above shows the correct length for the cable ducting, so a small bit of surgery gives us this... Blu-tacked on and looking much better in length! Lastly a comparison shot, just to show the difference in length between the unmodified (top) parts, and corrected (bottom parts) So as you can see, slow but steady progress! Hopefully get some more major work done on it over the next few days now that I've recovered a bit of the urge to do some modelling! Bill, thanks for the tip about the CMK decals, I hadn't noticed that, but thankfully I've got the same markings on a Model Alliance sheet which has the roundel bars the correct pink colour. So you've saved me a potential headache there! Thanks for stopping by folks!

Super looking stuff there General, quick question for you though. On the inside of the undercarriage doors, what did you use to make the new rivet detail? It looks absolutely super, and I've tried many things, but none of them leave me with results like that. Cheers bud, Nik

Just a small update today, one of those days where I seemed to do an awful lot but for very little to actually show for it. After looking at a pile of cockpit reference pictures I decided that I wasn't happy with the colour which was too dark, so a quick rummage in the toolbox turned up a lighter, more accurate (or at least I think so anyway) shade of grey for the cockpit interior, which after some detail painting and drybrushing looks not too bad. Most of it will be hidden behind the ejector seats anyway, but I know I've painted it! Next on the agenda was the instrument panel. CMK do a rather nice etched panel with a clear film of dials to go on the back. I'm not sure this is totally accurate (it looks a little more like a T4 panel to me) but as long as it gives the right overall impression I can live with it! Might do a little scratch building to create the fairly prominent radar scopes and make it look a little less 'two-dimensional' but thats a project for another day. Lastly for tonight was a little surgery on the intake trunking for it to receive CMK's replacement radar bullet. The bottom trunking is the original kit part (courtesy of the F.6 I've got going at the same time! ) and the part above shows the modified trunking, all this took was the removing of the moulded in part of the nose undercarriage bay. This next pic shows the difference between the orginal kit parts (bottom) and the modified parts to take the resin bits. The resin radar bullet required a bit of remodelling to the top in order for it to match up to the contours of the intake trunking, whereas the original kit parts required only a small amount of sanding to fit nearly perfectly. Although the improvement in detail in the u/c bay of the resin parts is probably negligible, I think the added weight in the front end will probably be a good idea to stop the beast sitting on its tail! Thanks for stopping by folks! Nik

John, Superb! Thanks for the help chief, should hopefully save me from making a hash of it and drilling some unnecessary holes. Thanks for the quick response! Nik

Hi Adrian! So many choices aren't there? Probably one of the worst things about building Lightnings! My initial thoughts had been to go for XS452 in the Akrotiri pink flamingo markings, just because its an unusual scheme that you don't see done all that often. But now that you've put ideas in my head about a LTF a/c in NMF I'm very tempted by that. You don't happen to have any pics of that said scheme do you? Having been on Lightnings you might even be able to answer a question I've got relating to the positioning of the Red Top pylons on the T5. Were these just in exactly the same place as all the other marks of Lightning? The resin nose conversion doesn't have these moulded in, and there aren't many pictures showing this kind of detail up close so as to get a reference from other panel lines, and if I'm going to start drilling holes in the resin, it would be nice if I got them in the right place! Save myself some uneccessary work repairing any wrong holes! Thanks for the tip about softening the resin in warm water Dan! That should make things meet up a little better when I come to joining the fuselage halves together! Nik

Evening all! A while back I picked up Eduard's re-boxing of the old Airfix Lightning and was excitedly looking forward to all the various goodies Eduard cram into their boxes. Having built a couple of these the first time they came out, and remembering what a dream of a kit they were at the time (admittedly through the eyes of a 12 year old boy) I hoped this would be more of the same and the kit would fall together. Sadly though on inspection of the fuselage halves, it turned out they were badly warped at the intake end of the fuselage. Where they should be round and meet making a nice circular intake shape, they were badly flattened out, and as a result had actually pinched in the forward fuselage beneath the cockpit area. After several attempts to heat and reshape the fuselage, but with no success I decided to give up and the kit was put to the back of the stash. I had picked up a set of model alliance decals for another Lightning I had in the stash, on which was the pink tailed Akrotiri Station Flight aircraft. You can probably guess where this is going from here.... Add into the mix one CMK T4/5 conversion set and a razor saw and off we go!! After a little filing and sanding down, not too bad a fit. A little splayed out at the front end, but nothing a liberal application of cyano glue and brute force won't fix! One important lesson I've learned already with this one though, pay attention to where you make those cuts... Not a total disaster by any means, but through carelessness I've made a bit more work for myself. Lastly the internal detail was painted in an appropriate dark grey (a very old tin of Humbrol 67 I think) washed with tamiya smoke, then drybrushed with lighter greys and small amounts of silver to pick up the detail. Stil needs a matt coat to make the contrasts seem a bit less stark, but altogether not looking that bad so far. So far I've been impressed with the ease at which I've been able to mate the resin front ends to the fuselage halves, which only needed three cuts with the razor saw and some filing to get the edge to match up with the new spine and wider fuselage. Definitely the ideal first conversion kit for someone looking to have a stab at this kind of thing! Thanks for stopping by folks!

Absolutely spectacular! Just the encouragement I need to start the two Lightnings I've got in the stash!

Fair point Tony, see what you're saying there. Saying that though, Buccaneers deployed to Red Flag in the 70s carried schemes not too dissimilar to the schemes worn by the Argosys, Beverleys and Hercules (although admittedly without the white cockpit areas)... so with a little artistic license seeing as its a what-if, I don't think it's too far beyond the realms of possibility. http://www.blackburn-buccaneer.co.uk/S2_XV...S2_XV160-2.html Scheme is slightly different, in that it's applied over the Dark Green and Medium Sea Grey, but it's not a million miles away. All the best, Nik

Awesome stuff! The colour humbrol give as light stone just didn't look right, Mid-Stone seems to be closer. Thanks for the help though! Nik

Evening All, Just a quick question, could anybody help me out with some colour issues I'm having. In a nutshell, I'm building a 'What If' TSR2 in the markings on Xtradecal sheet X48069, the option for the Akrotiri based a/c in the Light Stone, Dark Earth and Black undersides scheme. I'm a big fan of Humbrol paints as these are the easiest for me to get hold of, however, their colours don't seem to match too well the scheme itself and any reference pics of the scheme (admittedly not on TSR2's of course! ) that I can find. Could somebody help my out by suggesting what paints I ought to use for the scheme, ideally in Humbrol or Xtracolour, but other alternatives would be just as good. Thanks for any help guys, would be much appreciated! Regards, Nik

Fair point there Starfighter! That'll teach me to go with what Xtradecal says, I had thought the 20th TFW were based at Wethersfield, but being a trusting soul I just agreed with the decal sheet! Fixed it now though. Thanks for all the kind words folks! Much appreciated! Nik

Evening all, My second aircraft here on Britmodeller, this one has gone together in record time for me, just over 6 weeks, models like this normally taking me months to do. This was my first attempt at using any of Alclad's high shine paints, and I'm fairly pleased with the results. The overall finish isn't exactly mirror like, but I think this is down to the glossy black primer coat I applied not being the greatest. If I were to do it again, I'd apply a cout of Klear after the undercoat then polish it up with micromesh, I did this for the underwing drop tanks, and the result is a much more shiny metal coat (although the photos don't pick up on it too well because it's not all that bright at this time of the year in these parts). Only aftermarket parts used were the Aires cockpit set and Xtradecal sheet X48-083. The cockpit set itself is beautifully detailed, but an absolute nightmare to fit, involving lots of sanding, scraping and swearing, but the improvement over the kit parts (which in themselves are pretty well detailed) is fantastic. Decals were a dream to use and a couple of applications of Microsol and Microset helped them conform to some pretty awkward shapes. No weathering done on this one, as I don't want to damage the shiny aluminium finish, and with it being the squadron commander's aircraft, I'm pretty sure it would have been kept fairly clean anyway. As always, any comments or criticism is more than welcome, feedback will only help me improve! Thanks for looking folks! Nik

Afternoon all, While since my last post but major progress has been made, all the little fiddly bits added and the final decals on. Just a couple of pictures to show the progress. Here it is, everything on (leading edge slats, undercarriage, airbrake, IFR probe, Pitot tube and Drop Tanks) and last few decals added. I decided against weathering it with my usual mix of Oil paints, mainly to preserve the Polished Aluminium finish (which is delicate enough) and also because, this being the squadron commander's a/c it would probably have been kept in relatively good nick anyway. All in all a relatively quick, painless build, took just over 6 weeks start to finish. More pics of the finished article in Ready for Inspection. Thanks for looking folks, Nik

Afternoon all, First update on this for a little while. Progress has slowed down a bit due to various things happening over the past couple of weeks. But thankfully not ground to a complete halt. A quick bit of polishing really brought up the shine on the NMF, which while it isn't exactly like a mirror, looks much more like all the reference pics I have of Super Sabres from around this time. I wasn't entirely sure how to go about applying decals to this as I'd seen conflicting reports about decals going straight onto Alclad finishes, and wasn't sure about sealing it with Klear as I'd heard this quite often dulls the finish, but I took a bold step and went for it and thankfully the results haven't been too bad. Decals went onto the surface like an absolute dream, and with a couple of coats of Micro-Set and Micro-Sol have really adhered to the contours of the a/c and the panel lines, which was something of a worry as there are several very large decals such as the big red lightning flash and the tail markings. Next up was adding the photo-etch parts of the Aires cockpit set to the canopy itself, which was surprising easy, although the canopy hooks on the bottom were a bit of a disaster, mainly due to their incredibly small size and my big fingers! The final pic shows the canopy sitting placed on after painting. Not much left to do after this, some final decalling, leading edge slats need painted as in the picture above they're still in primer, as do undercarriage doors, pitot probe and IFR probe but finally approaching the finish with this! Thanks for looking folks!

Afternoon all, Another busy couple of days worth of modelling done with. Made some fairly big steps over the past couple of days so its finally looking like the real thing rather than a grey lump. First on my list of things to do was the gloss black primer for my Alclad Airframe aluminium, but not before I'd masked off everything that wasn't to be highly polished - the exhaust area, the darker panels on the wings and the cannon ports in the nose. Followed by two coats of Alclad Gloss black primer. Not the most exciting of pictures, but this stuff was much easier to use than I'd been expecting. No problems at all applying the stuff, and it dried within a couple of hours. Once this was dry it was time for the Airframe Aluminium to go on. This was a fairly brave step, in my rush to make progress, rather than testing the stuff out I jumped head on in and started applying it to the model itself. Not quite as easy to apply as the gloss black. The aluminium seemed to clog my airbrush pretty badly and went on very cloudy in patches (perhaps this was due to me doing something wrong? Anybody any pointers?) but once it had dried I was able to buff out the cloudy areas using an old soft tea towel. The most satisfying part of the whole finish is the contrast between the polished aluminium sections and the heated, discoloured metal around the exhaust, it looks a hell of a lot better than it did on its own now! Despite this being my first attempt at using the highly polished Alclads and the little snags I've run into, I'm really impressed with how easy this stuff is to use and the results that can be achieved even by a complete novice with the stuff like me. Up next will be some fiddly bits like fuel tanks and undercarriage doors - in my rush to play with the Alclad, I did my usual trick and forgot to do these bits all at the same time as I was doing the rest of that colour! Doh! Thanks for looking folks! Nik

More progress on the exhaust end of the jet. My box of Alclad related goodies arrived from Hannants today, so out came the airbrush once more! Carrying on from the work that had been done previously, the first step was to spray some Burnt Iron around the section closest to the afterburner itself as the majority of photos of Super Sabres show this to be very dark. Next up I mixed some of the Burnt Iron with an old almost empty bottle of Aluminium and into the mix went a few drops of Hot Metal Sepia to try to recreate some of the brown-ish/purple-ish discolouration around the hotter areas on the back end. Once this had all dried Hot Metal Blue was quite liberally added to the previous mix so I could get the blue-ish shades frequently seen. This left me with a lovely rainbow coloured back end to my Super Sabre, but the contrast between the colours was far too harsh in comparison to the real aircraft, so over the top of this went a very thin coat of Pale Burnt Metal. Not only did this soften the contrast between the blue-ish areas and the browny/purpley areas, it added in the straw like colour which seems to be common to the back ends of a lot of natural metal Super Sabres (a rather nice little accident I'd say! ) Only the one pic of the finished product as I was keen to crack on rather than bore everyone with a blow by blow account of every colour I'd sprayed over the afternoon! As you can see, a nicely discoloured back end to my Super Sabre! Next up comes the dreaded gloss black finish prior to some Airframe Aluminium. This is my first attempt at a high gloss finish using Alclads so if anyone has any tips as to how to get the best results, please do share them! Thanks for looking folks! Nik

First post for a few days now, replacement airbrush arrived, so I've been able to crack on with the painting. A rather satisfying layer of Halfords grey primer went on first, and revealed very little in the way of touching up to be done. A small miracle really! The biggest problem came when I knocked it off my desk and broke one of the wings off, so out came the green putty (which you can see in the first pic) to repair the damage. Frustrating but not the end of the world. I thought I'd start off with one of the trickier parts of the Super Sabre - the tail section around the afterburner can. Everyone know's these got pretty hot, so much so they eventually stopped painting these areas on the aircraft. I was keen to see the effects different primed surfaces would have on Alclad, so I decided to test out a couple of patches. One section was masked off and given a few coats of Klear to create a glossy finish to apply the Alclad over and the rest of the section was left in the Matt Grey of the primer. Out came a selection of Alclad paints - Aluminium, Duraluminium and Gold Titanium. First up the entire rear section was given a base coat of aluminium. The flash on the camera burns it out a little bit, but if you look closely you can see the difference in the shades of the panels. The section nearest the exhaust itself being a little lighter, as the result of the further away section being given a coat of Klear. Next up some Duraluminium was sprayed randomly along the panel lines to create some darker areas and start to simulate the discolouration caused by the heat. Again it's a little bit burnt out by the flash, but at this time of year, the light isn't strong enough to get good daylight pictures. Lastly (for today anyway) some Gold Titanium was sprayed on again on random panels, but trying to keep it in between the darker Duraluminium panel lines. Reference pictures show the metal took on an almost straw like colour in some parts due to the heat so while the photo doesn't show it too well because of the flash, it has given it that straw like colour. Next up will be some layers of Hot Metal Sepia, Hot Metal Blue and some Burnished Exhaust when they arrive from Hannants! Thanks in particular to Peter Marshall for his work in progress build of his Super Sabre, which provided much of the inspiration for the 'hot end' of my Super Sabre! Nik

Fantastic work so far, given me a few ideas for the Sea Vixen in the stash! Really like what you've done with the post shading, I'm normally a fan of pre-shading but tempted to try it your way having seen this. Thanks for the tip about the VL tail code as well, could prove handy!

Thanks Stan, very much appreciated! With sending it off to Ripmax, would you be able to shed any light on what I would need to do? Nik

Evening All, Slow progress over the past few days due to my airbrush going the way of the Dodo. Speaking of which, can anybody help me out with this, its an Aztek A470, but it started leaking air from the body recently and now it won't even spray thinners. Anyone know where I can send it in the UK for repair? (under the lifetime warranty) Or do I have to send it all the way back to Testors in the states? If anyone could help I'd really appreciate it, would let me get back on track with the several models in various stages of completion right now! Nik Icarus - Don't judge too harshly, thankfully that delightful background is one very old and very worn mattress - I was washing my bedsheets and it was the best lit flat surface I could find!

Evening all, As you can probably guess from the heading of the post, my trusty Aztec A470 after only a couple of years has decided not to play nice anymore. It started out as a small air leak from the main body itself, but without an noticeable loss of spraying power, it now leaks from the airbrush body profusely and won't even spray thinners anymore. It was only bought 2 maybe 3 years ago, so should still be under warranty, but the trouble I'm having is finding where to send it to get it repaired here in the UK? Everything I've seen would suggest it has to go all the way back to Testors in the States, someone please tell me this isn't the case? Any help on the matter would be greatly appreciated folks! Nik

Relatively slow progress on the build over the past couple of days, mainly focusing on the undercarriage itself and the undercarriage doors. Starting with the undercarriage, they were given a coat of matt white to act as a base. On top of that a wash of watered down Tamiya Smoke to give them a grimy look, and then drybrushed again with white. I prefer the dirty worn in look to an aircraft and its components, so while some might argue I've overdone the weathering a little, I always prefer the aircraft to look like it hasn't just rolled out of the factory. The tires still need a light drybrush of grey to bring out the detail, but with regards to the rest of the undercarriage I'm pretty happy how they turned out. The undercarriage itself was actually surprisingly accurate, the only thing missing being sections of the brake cables on the lower end of the struts themselves. This was easily replicated with the drilling of a couple of small holes and the addition of some fuse-wire running over the torsion links. The only other work done so far has been to the insides of the undercarriage doors themselves. I've seen several images which show differing colours for the insides, some showing natural metal, others an interior green, but since the aircraft itself will be natural metal, I chose green to inject a little bit of colour (that and I couldn't find any reference pics of the undercarriage specific to the aircraft in question). These got an overall coat of interior green (the closest match I had available) and again a wash of watered down Tamiya Smoke (whoever came up with this stuff was truly a genious! It makes weathering bits such as this so easy and gives great results) and dry brushed again with the interior green. The cabling and various bits were picked out with a light dry-brushing of silver and the addition of a couple of red cylinders so that it wasn't entirely green. It doesn't seem like I've made much progress, but getting all these fiddly bits out of the way will, touch wood, speed up the rest of the build. Nik

Evening all! Being a relatively new member on Britmodeller, I'd been a bit shy in posting anything, but finally decided to take the plunge and go for my first Work In Progress build - Trumpeter's 1/48 F100D. Even though the kit decals did provide a rather nice looking NMF Super Sabre, I couldn't resist buying Xtradecal's sheet for the 'Triple Zilch' a/c, and just because I'm a glutton for punishment, I opted for the Aires Resin Cockpit, which while it looks lovely painted up, is a nightmare to fit. So here we go! Basic construction taken care of: Still several small bits and pieces to do to the u/c bays and airbrake but I was keen to get cracking so left these for now. Overall everything has gone smoothly so far with the exception of the Aires cockpit, which in order to actually fit the fuselage required a lot of scraping, sanding, filing, swearing and squeezing, until I eventually gave up and decided to leave the resin sidewalls out and just settle with the tub itself! That's all for now, but hopefully get a good deal more done over the next few days.