Search the Community

This one has been quietly marinating in the stash for a while. A couple of weeks ago I splashed out on some extra parts and the package arrived at the weekend. Brilliant! Or so I thought. So, apart from Tamiya's viper I added Aires' tail pipe, wheel bays and weighted wheels along with Eduard brass. I quick search of the delivery box revealed that I was missing the Aires front office, fog it! I'd forgotten to add it to the order list. Another order required along with postage costs. So first off this is what Big Ed delivers: Seven packages containing masks for the canopy, a stencil set, "Remove before flight" tags, brass for the bang seat and cockpit which looks reasonably good along with brass for the exterior and a ladder. A lot of the external brass is for the air brakes and I'll probably have these closed so I don't expect I'll be using that. Price wise it made more sense to buy the Big Ed package rather than just the elements I wanted. Now the contents of the big box. Apologies for the photo quality. Normally I'd use my SLR but had a bad day with an Abrams so used the camera on the iPad. Not much to say about these two other than the parts are all cleanly moulded. I'd have liked a bit more definition in the panel lines but I'll see about that later. Decal set: Not sure how many of these I'll use. The contents of a box within a box. Nice to see that there are two canopies; Tinted and clear. As some aircraft had a mix of front and rear sections this is a nice addition. Nose cone is here as well however I think I'll replace the pressure vanes with metal ones. There was also an empty plastic bag. Not sure if it was meant to contain anything. Tail fin and engine bay. The pressure sensor on the tail leading edge looks a tad fragile as do the static dischargers on another sprue. Metal me thinks. Bang seat and 2 pilots. I might convert one of the helmets to JHMCS version after I've drilled out on of the heads. The ladder looks terrible but maybe I'm being over critical. Compared to the quality of the rest of the parts it looks like a 5min after thought. The plan is to try to paint the Have Glass finish. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to tackle that yet and obtain the patina required. I also wanted to add a Sniper pod in addition to the 213 Harm targeting pod. Additionally the Harm pod has to move over to the LHS leaving space for the AN/AAQ-33 Sniper pod. Seems the only people who manufacture an after market pod set are an outfit called Wolfpack however they seem to have stopped production of these parts. If anybody has a set somewhere that they'd like to convert into cash I'd be interested. The plan is to build a desktop display model with the engine alongside. It also means opening up some of the panels normally found open when the aircraft is parked and building some of the detail behind them. But before I start all that its back to ordering a few more parts.