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Showing results for tags 'Gentlemen... Start your engines!'.
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When I was very young, building airplane kits using only tube glue and whatever decals were included in the kit (paint? who needs paint?), I remember reading in the newspaper about how the President had revealed the US was flying a super-secret, super-fast spy plane. Not long afterward, Revell released a model of the SR-71, which I bought from my local hobby store and quickly glued together. I built one or two others over the years, my last one probably some time in the 1970s. By then I had graduated to using putty and rattle-can paint, but that's about as far as my skills had progressed. Since getting back into the hobby over the past few months, I've learned a lot of new techniques on this forum and have been pretty happy with my last few builds. So here I am about to try them out on the 1/72 Academy SR-71A Blackbird: Aftermarket items that I plan on using are shown below: My god -- This is a big airplane even in 1/72 scale! Although the parts count is relatively small, I foresee a couple of challenges already. First, the wheel wells (especially for the nose gear) are much too shallow. Fortunately (?) the Eduard PE addresses this, but it involves building a new bay from PE; we'll see how that goes.... The second challenge is the paint job. What??? (you might say), it's all black, what could be easier? Well, black can be notoriously difficult to make look right, and after viewing some photos of the actual aircraft I've found that the Blackbird typically had a heavily weathered appearance. Judge for yourself from the pics below: In my last build (Italeri's A-6E Intruder, see the RFI here: http://www.britmodeller.com/forums/index.php?/topic/235027369-a-6e-intruder-italeri-172/ ) I focused on learning how to realistically weather modern US Navy jets, which are in theory gray overall but in reality have many different shades of gray (50? LOL!) due to weathering, sun bleaching, anti-corrosion touch-ups, etc.). I'm thinking I can use these same techniques on the Blackbird, but with black instead of gray. Wish me luck!
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- Academy 1/72
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