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Hi all! I guess this is an aircraft, though it's rather non-traditional. This is one of Anigrand's 1/72-scale lifting bodies: the Northrop HL-10. It's a resin kit of 23 parts (+3 clear vacu-formed canopy pieces). First time building an Anigrand kit, and it was rather fun. Metallics are Alclad, and I weathered with acrylics, pigments, pencils, and oils. I was very wary of this thing ending up looking like a dinky tin toy; though I didn't quite get the finish I was after, but I'm happy enough with it. Thanks for looking!

This is the experimental lifting body flown during the late '60s, familiar to many (as the box art suggests) from the opening sequence of The Six Million Dollar Man. (Remarkably, Steve Austin left the B52 in an HL-10 and crashed in an M2-F2.) The kit doesn't have many parts, and those it has are relatively undetailed. The resin needed a lot of hot-dipping to straighten out various kinks, and a lot of filling and sanding to eliminate seams or improve fit, in particular at the join between upper and lower fuselage halves. The decal sheet was badly printed. I contacted Fantastic Plastic about this, but got no reply, so ended up scanning the sheet and rebuilding or replacing several decals using Experts-Choice decal paper. The paintwork is an experiment I very soon regretted. Other people appear to be able to use Alclad unsealed, but I'm not one of those people--the surface of my polished aluminium got distinctly unpolished and worn just with the very careful handling required to bed down the decals, and the different reflectivity of the decals is a bit of an offence to the eye from some angles. Altogether it was a dispiriting build, which very nearly ended up in the bin several times, and I never mustered the enthusiasm to begin a WiP thread. The highlight of the whole experience was the point at which I lost one of the control surface parts for a week, only to discover it in my trouser pocket while hunting for change for a parking meter. Old age doesn't come itself ... Here's what the real thing looked like: And here's what I produced. Some additional detail with styrene and brass rod. Paint is Alclad polished aluminium and matt white. Ejector seat straps are cannibalized from an Airwaves set, and the cockpit was detailed up a little using Airscale early Allied jet instrument decals. Either the kit undercarriage gear is too long, or I mistook part of the pour stub for part of the gear, so the model sits a little too high. This annoys me, but doesn't annoy me enough to make me want to revise it at present. It's a tail-sitter, of course, and I've made no effort to edit out the transparent rod I tucked under the engine bells for support. Thanks for looking, and well done for getting past the outpouring of negativity with which I started this post!

This is the second in a series of NASA lifting bodies. The first was my X-24A that I posted a few weeks ago. This is an Anigrand kit and while I see a lot of complaints about pin holes, and short shots with Anigrand kits, this one must have been cast on one of there good days. With the exception of the "transparencies" all the parts were clean and crisply molded with no pin holes or voids and the fit was very good. The exceptions were the "clear" parts that were translucent at best and in the case of the main canopy was way too small for the opening, but nothing some super glue, styrene strips, sanding and polishing couldn't fix. The decals were OK being a bit thick and stiff. Paint was Alclad II Aluminum. This was a very quick build taking less then a week to complete. On to the the pictures; Note that this was designed to fly at a high angle of attack, imagine the pitot tube horizontal and the pilot spent most of his time looking between his legs out the front glazing. More information about HL-10 can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_HL-10