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Rafale B Tiger Meet


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My fascination with Tiger Meet kits continues with this 1/72 Rafale B from Hobby Boss. I have built some 1/144 and 1/72 Revell Tornados, but I am branching out. This is the first Hobby Boss kit I have ever built. I am wondering if the fit and design of the kit, plus the quality of the decals will equal Revell.

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I have chosen the second Tiger Meet scheme in the box. The cover depicts another Tiger Meet aircraft. Upon opening the box, I am very pleasantly surprised with the amount of detail to the parts and surface. This is a very nice kit. Now, I have to admit, I have no knowledge of planes without propellers. If you asked me how accurate this kit is, couldn’t tell you to save my soul. I just bought it for the Tiger Meet scheme. If the kit goes together well and the decals fit, then I will be happy. Since my knowledge is negligible, I am solely relying on the color callouts in the instructions. My apologies if it offends the Rafale fans. I am not messing up on purpose. So on with the show.

Let’s start out with the, ummm, cockpit. Nice amount of parts, looks like a lot of detail in the kit parts, plus supplementation by decals. The layout of the parts with a base coat on each looks like this.

Cockpit1.jpg

There are various decals that need to be applied to the two instrument panels. I am encouraged after application of these decals. They seem to react well with Micro Set/Sol and snuggle down nicely. I hope the Tiger Meet decals work as well as these.

Cockpit2.jpg

I put the two seats together and then painted on a few details along with weathering one to compare to the unweathered one. Here are the back of the seats (which will probably be invisible once installed)

cockpit3.jpg

The sides, starboard, port and both sides weathered

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The cowling for the rear seat is next

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Finally, the tub is painted and various decals applied to good effect.

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Now, everything is put in the tub with these results. The fit was quite good except for one area. Each seat top has a gap that needs to be filled. That may very well be my fault as the fit for everything else was very good. So, need to break out the filler for these two little areas.

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Next up the center spline needs to have two vents installed and a little air scoop added. They all fit perfectly and I am still amazed at the detail level.

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The halves are split into upper and lower rather than right and left. I am hoping this will help ease any seams that need to be filled. I inserted the cockpit and canards which are designed to be moveable and joined the halves. They fit well and there appears to be minimal seams to fill and sand. (And for that I am thankful!!)

body1.jpg

And this looks like a good stopping point. My initial impressions of this kit and Hobby Boss are quite good. I hope they hold out for the entire build. Comments always welcome and encouraged.

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George,

Now that is gonna be one Helluva build. :clap:

I love the Tiger markings... You have made a great start..

Good job so far..

Cannot wait to see more.

Keep up the brilliant work ..

:clap::thumbsup::yahoo:

Edited by HOUSTON
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New update. Sorry I have taken so long. The next phase is to get the fuselage ready to accept the decal scheme and then work on some subassemblies. To that end, I tidied up the cockpit where there was a gap running along the top of the seats, glued the clear range finder and then temporarily set the canopy in place. The final configuration of this kit will have the canopy opened. To ease with the decal placement and painting, the canopy is temporarily placed in the closed position. And, it is masked, oh joy.

Canopy1.jpg

There is an insert that fits inside of the canopy that I will place when I open it up. Did the frame around it, kinda messed up, will fix it in a few.

Canopy2.jpg

I then sprayed the base coat on the kit. As per the kit instructions it is a monotone color, same top and bottom.

basecoat1.jpg

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While I wait for the base color to dry, I will start on some sub-assemblies. My plan of attack is to let the body dry, weather it very slightly and then apply the main tiger scheme with the least amount of hangy down /on stuff to ease in application. Then, I will add all of the other parts. Otherwise I know my ham fistedness will cause innumerable pieces to break and my general gentile demeanor will get trashed. So, the first sub-assembly will be the exhaust section. Here are all of the parts

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Here they are put together.

Exhaust2.jpg

Fit was fairly good. I will have a couple of seams to fix after the glue sets. So this will be put aside and I now move on to the underwing hangy down things.

First up is the Apache. It is well represented with more than a few parts

Apache1.jpg

I initially glued the main body parts together, let them set and then cleaned up the seams. Then I could put on the various fins trying to make sure they all aligned up with each other and the body. Not too fiddly and not too shabby.

apache2.jpg

The next assemblies were fairly easy if not tedious. They consisted of the two different sizes of fuel tanks and the missiles.

Small fuel tanks

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largefueltanks2.jpg

Large fuel tanks

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Missiles

missles1.jpg

missles2.jpg

With everything in some sort of drying phase, I will close here. Next up is weathering the body and painting the sub-assemblies. All comments welcome.

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Hendie,

Here is my warped plan. This was an existing aircraft prior to the special Tiger scheme being placed on it. So, I wondered if prior to the Tiger Scheme, did they repaint the entire aircraft, or just give it a pretty good cleaning before applying the new paint? If it was just cleaned prior to the new Tiger Scheme applied, then the underlying paint would be older and somewhat lightly weathered. The Tiger paint, however would be brand new. Hence, I am going to lightly weather before the decals as I want the underlying paint to look older than the freshly applied Tiger Scheme. Does this make sense or am I just standing out here on my own island with the rest of the coconuts?

As for the airbrush thingy. This finish was a matte paint. The ones on the F-104 have been aluminium and gloss white. Both have given me fits and are fighting tooth and nail to convince me hairy sticks are better. I beat the aluminium into submission. Now the white is running, not covering and drying splotchy. Which is really odd since the underlying plastic is white.

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So what is the weather report today? I believe it will be slight to moderate. In my answer above to Hendie, I stated I wanted to portray this plane after it had been painted for the Tiger Meet. Going on the premise the Tiger Scheme would be freshly painted on top of cleaned, but old paint, the weathering should be done prior to the application of the Tiger Scheme. So here are some pictures of the weathering process. I am a big fan of Flory’s weathering products as they are easy to use, easy to clean up, and most importantly, easy to remove when I screw up and have to start over. Which is what happened in this case. I originally tried to weather in the mud wash, but the results were less than stellar. I then switched to the Dark Dirt wash to try that. I originally rejected this wash because I thought it would be too harsh and the results would be too much. I started with the underside of the aircraft figuring if I messed up here, how often is one of my models turned upside for a gander? The following photos show the various stages of the wash with the end result which I think came out okay.

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This is what the kit looked like with the starboard side weathered and, for comparison, the port side waiting its turn.

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Starboard half.

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This is the port side prior to weathering

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Port side all washed up; waiting for me to remove almost all of it.

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And a slightly weathered aircraft that has been cleaned prior to the paint application, but not repainted.

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Next step is to seal it with a coat of Future/Klear, let dry and then lay down the Tiger Scheme. All comments welcomed.

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Hendie,

I cannot recommend Flory's enough. If a dunce such as myself can make them work, you should be able to make masterpieces. They are so easy to use. The effects can be varied by how long you wait before you wipe it off, and if you put it down over a matte finish versus a shiny finish. It is easily removed by using either a good quality paper towel (don't use the cheap brands, they leave too much lint) and Q-tips. Just rubbing it with a dry paper towel or Q-tip will begin to remove the wash. If you want more removed, the just wet the paper towel or the Q-tip with your tongue and that is enough moisture to remove almost all of the wash. If you mess up, then just put the kit under running water and the wash will literally wash away. It is great fun to play around with and comes in many different colors. They are good stuff. A good demonstration of their use is own Flory's web site.

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Thanks Oliver. Coming from you, as I have admired, been in awe and drooled over your various helicopter builds, I take that as a great compliment. I am a big fan of your builds. You, sir, are freaking talented!!

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I think I am ready to start with the decal scheme for this aircraft. I wanted to do the hard part prior to putting all of the extra doo dads, knick-knacks, and hangy down pieces that, in my clumsy oaf way, would knock off. The only other tiger meet kits I have done are 1/144 and 1/72 Revell kits. Hobby Boss and Revell have chosen very different ways to approach installing the decals on their respective kits. Revell has a multitude of sections that if you carefully piece it together like a jigsaw puzzle, makes into a stunning model. The problem with this approach is making sure each piece is precisely lined up correctly as one that is off will affect 4 or 5 other pieces. Normally, even for the 1/144 models there are upwards of 25 to 40 pieces.

Hobby Boss clearly has taken a different approach. To cover essentially the entire top portion of the plane, plus the both sides of the tail, there are only 10 decal pieces and 3 of those are for the cockpit section. The down side of this approach is each Hobby Boss piece is fairly large. Placement of each piece, without ripping it will be a challenge. Study of the decal diagram for all of these kits is essential planning. The hardest decision is which should be the first piece placed on the kit. The reason why such concern for the first piece is if it is placed wrong, the entire scheme will be off. For this kit, I chose the middle spline piece. I figure if that correct placement of this piece will be easier to maintain as it has a definite starting point, the edge of the rear canopy, and it runs the length of the raised center spine and then along the tail section where it meets the wing. If I place this correctly, it should be easy to line up the stripes on each wing section, and then proceed to line up the canard sections and leave the canopy to last. The tail pieces are pretty easy to figure out how to line up. So, all of this talk is how I justify this update will be limited to one decal piece. (How wretched and pathetic is that?) In addition to lining up the first decal correctly, I am must experiment with how well these decals react to setting solution. I have never done a HB kit, so I have no clue how well their decals work. Let’s find out.

Here, I have placed the decal in what I hope is the correct position.

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As you can see, the decals are not behaving properly and must be persuaded to lie down (okay the grammar freak in me had to research if it is lay or lie. Still probably got the rule wrong.) There is way too much wrinkling and failure to conform to the surfaces of the kit. First step is to apply a generous dose of Micro Sol and see what happens.

topdecal6.jpg

Still too much wrinkling and not enough snuggling into the kit surface detail. For the next 30 minutes I strategically applied more Micro Sol layers with very gentle persuasion of the decals to smooth out and snuggle into place using a very soft paint brush. I got progress and better results.

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I have more progress. The Micro Sol seems to be slowly working, so I do not think I should resort to a stronger solution. Now using spot layers of Micro Sol and smoothing the solution over the stubborn parts of the decal I start to get the results I want. Almost all of the wrinkles disappear, surface detail starts to appear and a painted appearance is portrayed.

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I am satisfied with both the location of this decal and how it has adhered to the surface and reacted to the setting solution. I know this doesn’t look like much progress, but the placement of this one decal took well over 4 hours. But, now that it is lined up, fitting the rest should be easy!! (I know famous last words that I will regret.) Now, would you like to know the bonehead error I made? Go up to the first picture and look at the tail section near the exhaust. Notice it is a very different color than the rest of the plane. It really shouldn’t be. Why, because it should have been attached to the plane prior to the placement of the first decal. How did I know it was missing? Well, when I initially put the spline decal on, it extended past the end of the plane by a considerable amount. That seemed very odd to me. I look at all the decal hanging off, look at the picture, see it is placed correctly at the front of the kit at the canopy; and still wonder why so much left over? Look at the drawings again and I notice the tail section of the decal extends over the exhausts. Hmmm, where are my exhausts? Not where they should be. So I quickly wet the ends of my decal so they don’t dry out; carefully place glue around the exhaust section and stick it into place. I don’t have time for it to dry, so I have to place the leftover hanging decals along the end of the exhaust section and hope I was not too sloppy with the glue. For once, I got fortunate and a hair-brained idea worked.

Comments welcome.

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You just keep getting better and better at this modeling malarkey George!

I must admit to thinking something along the lines of "oh dear..." when I saw the first, and even the second photo but by the time I got to the last photo I was very impressed. It looks like you really nailed the positioning of the decal too

It's amazing how well the decal has settled down and really looks like it's a paint finish.

You keep introducing all these new modeling materials... flory washes, micro sol/set

btw - Where do you get your flory washes from? I could find only one supplier in the US.

It looks like I will need to wait a few weeks before I go on another spending spree and get the flory stuff - I just got the Trumpeter Dauphin, a load of paints, some photo etch and a few other bits and pieces, not to mention booking two hotel rooms for a week for later in the summer.

Edited by hendie
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Hendie,

Thank you for the kind words. Not real modeling skill, just some judicious application of chemicals, light brush strokes and patience. I get Flory products from Sprue Brothers mail order. I must get some more as I am out of a couple of the colors. I am trying to avoid it, as I know I will end up justifying buying one or five models to justify the shipping costs!! So where are you off to this summer?

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I have some friends coming over from Scotland in July so we're just heading down to Virginia (Busch Gardens) for a week. We'll do the theme park, the water park and some of the historical stuff - Jamestown, Williamsburg etc

I agree with you about shipping costs - I have spent a fortune on shipping alone this week. I did find one website who's shipping costs I thought were very reasonable ( http://www.hammondtoy.com/ ). However, They don't have a huge range of models and they only stock Testors/Model Master paint range, and their website (and navigation) is rather user unfriendly - but their costs were cheap and they had the stuff in the post with tracking the next morning, so I'll definitely use them again. It beats having to pay $8 or $9 then having to wait a week before some dork eventually remembers to put the stuff in the mail.

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I get the quickest service when I buy online from Squadron, but that is because they are only 30 miles away. Otherwise, I really like Sprue Brothers as they are very fast to ship and if you buy enough (not really a problem, although my addiction counselor would disagree) shipping is free. If you haven't tried them I would recommend them.

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Decal update. Once I managed to get the initial spline decal installed correctly and learned how to get the decal to snuggle down into the kit detail, it was fairly easy to do the rest of the Tiger scheme.

The large port body decal was next.

tigerdecal1.jpg

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I lined it up with the spline decal, but the initial placement does leave something to be desired. These decals will not lie down by themselves and conform to the surface detail. There are wrinkles, bumps and bubbles abound. Persuasion is necessary; Micro Sol is the weapon of choice. I have stronger setting solutions, but I have found it is better to go at it slow with multiple applications to protect the decal itself and end up with an appearance it was painted on. So the fun begins. This is the result after a second application of Micro Sol.

tigerdecal6.jpg

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The finish is better, but now pebbly. Another round of setting solution and then I gently brush the decal with a #7, long tapered, soft, camel hair brush that is only used for this purpose. (I found out the hard way, using a general, all-purpose brush that contains traces of paint or thinner can create a wonderful chemical reaction with setting solutions that is highly interesting to look at as your decals dissolve and melt, but ultimately defeats your purpose.) What I do with the brush is smooth any wrinkles and essentially polish the decal into the surface detail. A light touch is needed as too hard and the decal rips or worse, smears. While I let the third application of setting solution dry on the port side, I apply the port tail fin tiger eye and the canard decal.

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They also need multiple treatments.

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The above is after the second treatment and it has settled down fairly well, but there is still a long wrinkle along the middle of the eye that needs to be remedied.

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The above is the finished port side. In hind sight, I should not have tried to work on 3 decals at once and was taking a chance. Sometimes my patience level isn’t what it should be. You can see two little places that will need some touch up where the surface protrusion of the kit popped up through the decal. Next up is the starboard side.

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After a second application of setting solution and applying the tail decal.

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There are still some wrinkles and areas that need to adhere more to the kit detail. You can really tell from the overhead shot where both the finished port side can be compared to the not so finished starboard side. So more brushing and chemical application.

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So the Tiger scheme has been applied and is all nice and hunkered down into the kit decal. I estimate I did this over a 5 hour period, most of it waiting for sections to dry before new applications of setting solution. I am going to let this fully dry and then apply some sort of protective coat on it, probably Future/Klear. The layout and clarity of these decals is superb. It equals the Tiger Meet decals supplied in the Revell kits as to finish and photographic detail. As to the construction sequence and fit of decals to each other. Both Revell and Hobby Boss are excellent. However, both could maybe spring for some extra instructions as to the method and sequence of the decal application. If you do not have some experience, you will be lost on where to start. Where the Hobby Boss decals let down is how unwilling they are to conform to the kit detail. There is considerable more effort required to get these decals to appear as if they were painted on versus the Revell decals. Given that, if you put the effor in, these decals look great once applied!! Comments always welcome.

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