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1:48 Airfix F6 Lightning XR 753 - all in


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Just a mini update. I filled and sanded some minor defects like sinkmarks which did not completely vanish and seam lines. As mentioned above there are some bigger sink marks at the wing tips which are not so prominent under a dull coat but will be beaming on a NMF finish. I was quite surprised how much filler they needed:

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So a final (hopefully) primer coat and then the interesting part beginns :shutup:

Rene

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Progress has slowed down considerably but I am still working at it. Not much to show though. I painted the airframe in dark grey (semi gloss - which is not a good thing for Alclad), the spine in gloss white and started to pic out some panels in gloss black which I diluted with thinner so it will flow and level a bit better when brushpainted on. As the Revell gloss black takes ages to dry I have to paint this colour is several stages so I will not smear the paint. When all panels are done I plan to give everything a light sanding to remove lints etc from the current paint. After this I will not polish the paint but will try to add a gloss enamel coat (yes - I could use flat black then, which dires more quickly but I will stick to gloss black as it will be a bit more even when dry I think) - this will be poliseh in the end. The reason for doing so is that if I would polish the semi gloss grey I will polish though to the bare plastic and would have to repair these areas. So I hope the gloss coat will do the trick. That is what I got so far:

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And here are two pics of a racing Mustang which was primed in different grey shades and then sprayed with Alclad Chrome. The real thing is very shiny and I think no other Alclad colour would reproduce this - to use grey instead of black makes the Chrome look more like highly polished Aluminum than the instructed black coat:

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This was my first attempt and as you see I did not polish the base layer enough, so you can see the "spray pattern". Maybe I will sand and polish it down to the base layer and spray it once more with Alclad sometime.

Rene

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  • 2 weeks later...

Depending on the point of view not much has happened... except several layers of gloss clear with sanding in between and at the end using Abralon and Alclads polishing set (up to 12000). Yesterday night I called it a day (though there are still plenty of areas which are most likely not polished enough) and plan to spray the Alclad colours tonight at last...

p40l_zps59818d38.jpg

As I have 2 weeks off now I hope I can still finish it in time.

Rene

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  • 2 weeks later...

Sorry for the late update - just a quick one. I will probably edit it later for more details. I used Alclad chrome, airframe aluminum and polished aluminum:

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I did some minor corrections (especially on the ill fitting nose cone) before I started a six hour decaling session yesterday to catch up.

0550DAB6-27E7-4D5D-B095-75632436892B_zps

So what is left? I still have to paint the canopy (I seperated two vac canopies - front from CMK and rear from Aeroclub because I messed up the CMK one which is a tad crisper IMHO). Obviously the U/C is to be done too as are some smaller parts. The radar cone is already painted and ready for installation. Oh yes - a final clear code will be done too. I think I will meet the dead line.

Rene

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Thank you all.

Just minor work left now. I created some problems to spice the final assembly up a bit: First I left off the clear parts for the wingtip position lights as I was not sure how the lights look like. Finally I found a pic today and now I knw it would have been easier to attach the clear part, mask the small light and paint the clear part in NMF together with the rest. I guess I will use Humbrol polished Aluminum now on the lights instead of Alclad.

All the small antennas became victims of the carpet monster as I was too lazy to get some bluetac from the basement and tried to attach them with tweezers. The two on which I succseeded were knocked off... So I cut new ones from etched fret material. The good thing is they look better than the kit parts. Pics will follow.

Another mistake was done when I decided to quickly (the evil word) mask the anti glare panel and paint it with Revell Aqua. I masked it the wrong shape (Edit: you see two mistakes here of course - the masking tape lifted the decal with the pilot name. If anybody has a spare one please PM me):

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(Photos edited on January 7th 2014)

However I hope to be able to scape away the Aqua pant to the correct shape with a toothpic. When will I ever learn to use my reference when I work on a certain area instead of before and after only? I would have spotted the wrong panel lines too then: The anti glare panel follows the panel lines but the ones of the Airfix kit are not parallel as they should be (I will update this post with better pictures next week).

The U/C is installed as well and there is another mistake which Airfix, CMK and surprisingly also Aeroclub (I used these parts) got wrong: The middle joint of the retracktion bar (hope you understand what I mean) should be twisted by 90° and not be in the same direction as the other joints:

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(Photo edited on January 7th 2014)

OK - off for the home stretch now...

Rene

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Thanks.

The anti glare panel was masked and corrected (there is a kink now where there was a straight line before). Well I hope so - I am still not convinced it is correct but it has to do as it is.

I took some more short cuts than planned to get this done but: I will just meet the dead line - only these few parts will have to be fixed and the metal areas of the clear wing tip lights need a bit of Gunze Aluminum (the polish type) to call it done:

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I hope the whether will be better tomorrow so I can take the RFI pics outside.

Thanks for watching and as said above I will add some more info here next week on the build.

Rene

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As promissed here is my final update on this build. First of all I replaced the pictures in the posting above (Posted 03 January 2015 - 10:00 AM).

I am taking some steps back now.

Here are some more pics on the NMF, which hopefully speak for themself.

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I think the grey base coat could have been darker - still I am really happy with the result. Using different Alclad colours to create shading and stressed skin seems to be an easy solution which I will keep using in future projects. I already polished the Mustang racer shown in a previous post back to the base colour to give it a better finish.

As mentioned above I used vacuformed canopies from CMK and Aeroclub. I cannot imagine how I would have painted these without ready-made masks. Usually I am perfectly fine with Tamiya tape and liquid mask for canopy masking - when the canopy provides some relief to show where to mask. Vac canopies are sometimes to subtle in regard of this - so if possible I use precut masks on these.

In this case I used Eduard masks which gives the option to paint the seal colour first (I painted the interior colour first of course and then the a seal colour), then mask over again and spray the final colour. With a brush I painted the inside in dull interior colour - following the interior colour outline I did from the outside. This way the inside will be dull and you do not have to work super-exactly as the shape will be given by the outside layer of interior paint (can you follow???):

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The missiles were sprayed white, then masked and painted aluminum colour. Decals are from the box.

The nose radome shows some distinct wear on the real things which I tried to replicate as shown above. But the final coat was a bit too solid - maybe I give it a slight sanding some day to improve.

And to end this build report some last pics of the repainted anti glare panel (not perfect but it has to do), the installed Master nose probe (looks far superior to the thick kit part) and the issues with the Airfix stencil decals.

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I hoped that Barracuda will rerelease their F.2 stencils in time. Which did not happen. When I ordered some parts for my upcoming Sea King GB build from Flightpath UK I saw their Lightning decal sheet contains stencils too. I am pretty sure these will be excellent and ordered it right away.

As masking tape can lift the Airfix decals without damaging the paint below (the attentive reader knows why I know) I will replace the worst stencils in the future. Maybe I will add the break lines and other omitted details too then - in the future...

Thanks for watching and the kind words,

René

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