The Last Naval Night Fighter - 24/6 update

[trickyrich]

This was one of that builds I had planned as a second possible build for this GB, and actually one of the inspirations for the GB itself.

 

 

I’ve had this model for a while now and have always wanted to build her.

 

 

She’s a pretty basic model not much to her and surprisingly straight an not warped for a change…..ok the nose well bay is…no biggy.

 

 

I’ll be doing the Marine version used in Korea, which was the last carrier based Nightfigher the US produced. Though it’s use in Korea by the Marines was off airfields. The Skyknight shot down more enemy aircraft then any other single type of naval aircaft for the loss of only one aircraft.

 

 

I’ve made a sort of start….and lots of dust opening up the exhausts openings and intakes. 

 

 

I’m going to use some short pieces of brass tube to lengthen the intakes a bit as they were too shallow. 

 

 

There’s no surprises with this build so if should be quick and simple, once I get the intakes and exhaust areas sorted out.

[trickyrich]

Ok this wee puppy. A lot of progress and resin dust has occurred since the start of this build, and I happy to say it’s good progress with no major issues.

 

I continued on with the intakes and exhaust areas. 

 

I finished up opening up the exhausts for the rear can, it now sort of fits.

 

 

 

I’ve filled part of the opening and started final shaping. As can be seen the LHS pipe (right in the photo) is almost perfect, the other just needed a little bit more filler before I can finish that side. While I was at it I started filling in lots of small holes on the underside of the fuselage. They aren’t resin bubbles just small pimple like holes…..a bit different than normal!

 

 

I’ll spend a little bit more time smoothing and finishing that area off but it’s more or less done. Next will be the intakes and their new ducting.

 

Next up I started cleaning up the wings, the trailing edge on one of them was really think  (top one) so I had to sand it back and re-profile it, then redo the panel lines. Both of these wings also had a small section of these pimples in the resin, these were filled too, then sanded back.

 

 

Next was the cockpit….lots of fun was had trying to get this to fit!! As can be seen in photos the resin is VERY thick and this didn’t help with fitting the cockpit, I had a 1/4” gap top and bottom between the fuselage sections! Time for some serious grinding action! (Hmm not that kind!!!!    )

 

As can be seen I’ve done most of the LHS but still had a bit to go, plus to finish off smoothing out the surface.

 

 

Plus to get it all to fit I had to remove the extra front and rear bits on the cockpit floor, they weren’t seen anyway, plus I had to thin back the sides of the cockpit tub as well.

 

 

I my enthusiasm to brush the resin dust away I accidentally flick the hole fuselage away and broke it!! Opps! 

 

 

No worry, some CA glue and it’s all sorted.

 

 

All the main prep work is now pretty much done, the cockpit has been primed, it’s painted black, so most or any detail will be lost so I won’t get too carried away there. I just need to finish off the intakes and exhausts and I can close her up (the cockpit can almost be painted later). Then the rest will come together very quickly, so I’m really happy with were I’m at.

[Valkyrie]

The effort you put into all your builds and hosting too is quite incredible. I want a dose of your modelling mojo. This GB is certainly firing a lot of imagination and effort and this is shaping up to be a super detailed build. 

[Caerbannog]

Looks way better than some others of Collect Aires castings 🙂 I always liked their line up and was quite surprised at the quality when I first saw pictures of the kit parts. I was always under the impression that they did top-notch high-tech kits. Good marketing they had 😄

Still a pity that they went out of business.

 

Will be watching with interest

Rene

[trickyrich]

mmm their quality was quite varied. I'd never say it was top notched by any way shape or form, I've built quite a few now! They did produce some interesting and quite rare models, but quality was never really up there. I have around 10 of their models and quality isn't that great, in fact some of their really rare stuff I'll probably never build as its truly horrible so will sell them.

 

It's a real shame, they had the right idea but just didn't try that little bit extra, in my opinion. With a bit more care they could have produced museum quality models. Now half baked models from them go for stupid price's and for the most part will never be built! Perfectly understandable why they went bust and they weren't the first and won't be the last. Thankfully there are still some out there that want to produce good resin models even if they are a wee bit on the expensive side.

 

Enough ranting before I start burning some of those horrible models!                                           

[Col.]

Not the first subject I'd think of for the night-fighter category Rich but an interesting one. Good to see you getting your resin fix in  

[BerndM]

An interesting build. My first and only Skynight so far was the Matchbox kit back in the days.

[trickyrich]

there is a plastic version in 1/48th by Czech Models (Encore did a limited release of a re-box of this model), nearly as hard to get at times as the Collect-Aire beast. In interesting aircraft that saw use right up the the Vietnam war and a bit later as a test mule.

 

The Matchbox one is meant to be quite good actually.

[trickyrich]

Believe it of not I have actually been work on build for this GB and not other projects….mostly.

 

While waiting for bits I’ve done some on the Do-215…but I won’t talk about THAT model…I strongly dislike her at the moment!

 

So this beasty has taken up 2 days worth of work so far, and I’ve made great progress on her.

 

So where am I at, not in any particular order…..

 

…ok the exhausts. These needed to be sorted out first, I had almost finished up trial fitting the exhaust can when I noticed the shape was different on each side. The RHS shape was wrong, at first I though I’d have to add some resin blocks and reshape the whole thing……

 

 

……..but that wasn’t all. After some carefully measuring I found that side was to long! 

 

 

So after a bit of reworking and reshaping it looks much better, still a wee bit of tiding up to do then.

 

 

I could now fit the cans.

 

 

Whilst working on the engine area I fitted the new brass intake ducts. The kit ducts weer way too short so I’ve extended them using brass tubing (I needed to join two smaller sections together to give me the length I needed). I needed to add some filler to tidy up the join. It’s going to need a bit of work to clean-up, but I can fit these once the fuselage is joined.

 

 

 

Next up the cockpit. The original cockpit just didn’t fit and as seen previously I needed to do quite a bit of work to get it to fit….. and ended up requiring even more!!!  The cockpit details were pretty rough so I raided the spares for some PE bits. It’s not accurate by any means but at least now it looks the part, plus with the canopy closed you won’t notice. For the IP dials I tried something a bit different, with and old PE IP I used my micro Punch & Die to create each instrument, it’s had to see but it looks pretty cool.

 

 

Look quite good in place.

 

 

 

While I was looking at photos of the cockpit I found out that the seation behind the crew wasn’t shaped like the fuselage, as with the model. But actually was a flat shelf with stuff on it (not too sure what!). So that section was removed and I’ll add the new section and “stuff” later.

 

Ok one last thing before I could close up the fuselage….the wings.  There were holes in the fuselage and wee locating stubs on the wings, but they didn’t quite fit and there was no strength in then, so I had to fit new supports…… 2 hours later……brass locating holes in fuselage and aluminium pins in wings.

 

 

It turned out the kit holes on the LS side for the wings were in the wrong place, too low! It’s not the first time I’ve come across this with one of these models! Am getting use to doing this sort of work now.

 

Right, I could now close up the fuselage, a fairly simple and quick task with resin and CA cement. A few minutes later and she was sanded and panel lines done! You can see how she got her nickname "The Whale"!

 

 

I did forget one important item……the nose wheel well!    Not a biggy, the opening was really poor to start with, so all I did was make it a bit wider and then slot the wheel well in place. I’ll redo the opening with plastic strip, I needed to do that anyway. Plus I added some weight before closing this section up as well.

 

 

From now on things will happen really quickly, the wings and tail will go on next. There’s some really bad wing/fuselage joins! I may have to use plastic strip to sort those out. Luckily there’s not a lot of panel lines to do either.

 

 

 

With luck by the end of tomorrow all the major construction work will be completed, the intakes will be fitted, new cockpit shelf, and nose gear frame work all ready for sanding and polishing. 

 

This is one of the nice things about working with resin, things happen really quickly. So far this build hasn’t thrown up any real issues which is a nice change. Plus for once, resin bubbles don’t seem to be a real issue which is super nice.

 

Things going to plan plus if I don’t get all the bits for the Viggen, then there’s a real chance she may be painted by the weekend, which will be nice as I’m going off-shore for 2 weeks starting the following week.

[Greg Law]

Looking go Rich. What filler are you using on this resin kit? 

[Getting Old]

I haven't seen resin kits in real life, this is very informative thank you 👍

[Hockeyboy76]

I haven’t seen this aircraft before. Great work Rich. 

[trickyrich]

4 hours ago, Gettig Old said:

I haven't seen resin kits in real life, this is very informative thank you 👍

thanks, they're lots of fun and a great way to improve your modelling skills.

 

Like plastic models their quality varies from amazing to "it probably should go into the trash". They're not that much different to build, you just go about it a slightly different way. Plus once you've gotten the resin bug then it's all over!! 

 

....plus it can be a quite expensive addition as well, just got this baby....

 

 

....too scared to mention the price just incase SHMBO finds out!!

 

 

 

[trickyrich]

6 hours ago, Greg Law said:

Looking go Rich. What filler are you using on this resin kit? 

opps nearly forgot this...

 

A bit of everything, for big gaps or some sort of body re-working I'll generally either cut out the section and glue some leftover resin bits. This makes the re-working so much easier as it's the same material. Or I'll use plastic strip, say if I'm re-working sides of U/C bays like I'll have to here.

 

For general filling it sort of depends on the join, but either CA cement (though you have to work it fairly quickly or it just goes too hard) or Tamiya Fine Filler (the white stuff).

 

The wing joins on this one will be a bit nasty so I'll either fill with thin strips of resin or plastic first, then filler.  I'll let you know which a bit later on today! 

[Mottlemaster]

Some super work on show Rich . A resin Master Class

[trickyrich]

Well another good days worth of work on her but looking at the photo’s it doesn’t seem that much has been done....to me anyway!

 

I started to box up the nose wheel well with plastic strip, it’s not quite square, but some careful work with the sanding sticks will sort that out.

 

 

Did some more work on the intakes, this seems to be taking forever to get right!

 

Next up was the cockpit area, I needed to add the new section behind the main cockpit area. I fitted some card to the hole and added some details to this area. It’s not 100% accurate but it’ll all be painted black and have a canopy over it, so it’ll look nice and busy and sort or how it should look. 

 

 

 

The strips on either side are for the VacForm canopy to mate up against. I’ve only recently started doing this and it really helps with fitting these VacForm canopies and gives them a bit of support as well. I can glue the canopy against them, then add filler if needed and sand back against it without worrying the canopy will fold inwards. I have also started at add the gun sight and tidy up the cowling. There’s still quite a bit more to do before I can fit the canopy in place, but it’s starting to look nice and busy, it'll all be black!

 

 

Right time for the big stuff……

 

The elevators unit was fitted to the rudder unit, the rudder needed a bath in hot water as it was a bit warped at the front.

 

 

Now the wings, with the pins and sockets fitted it was a really simple job. I levelled each wing and tacked it in place with CA glue (Tamiya CA Cement Strong – worth it’s weight in gold and really the only stuff I’ll ever use). Once I was happy with the alignment I fixed them in place with lots of CA glue am thin plastic rod. This pretty much filled all the nasty wing/fuselage gaps.

 

 

Then before it CA glue had completely dried ( I also use Accelerator) I filed/sanded back the joins. It’s much easier to do before the glue has become super hard, which the Tamiya stuff does after a while. No fun sanding it back then!!!

 

 

 

 

As can be seen the joins are great, especially the lower ones which I though would be the hardest to finish!

Some filler and a quick whip over with a Acetone soaked cotton bud at it’s all nice.

 

 

In between all this I also started tiding up (and ort of building) the drop tanks, they were the usual poorly cast things, but with a little work they should look ok.

 

 

It doesn’t look like a lot, but there’s about 5 hours worth of work here. Am super happy with progress, not sure if I’ll be finished by next weekend but it’ll be close. Even if the Viggen bits arrive next week I’ll still continue on with her as best I can.

 

Now I just have to save up for…or find a cheap 1/32ndAD-1 Skyraider! 

 

[Getting Old]

Skilled work and very interesting, lots of useful information too 

[janneman36]

You are a brave man to tackle a collectaire kit...i have a XF10-1 from them and the fit is horrible especially lenghtwise..

Love what you are doing..

 

 

[trickyrich]

20 hours ago, janneman36 said:

You are a brave man to tackle a collectaire kit...i have a XF10-1 from them and the fit is horrible especially lenghtwise..

Love what you are doing..

 

 

actually that's pretty much the norm for them, they all vary in degrees of unbuildability! But at least they are consistent at it so you sort of know what you're getting into.  

[BerndM]

Wow ! Thats modelling the hard way. Looks good !

[Valkyrie]

These how to do classes are brilliant, like distant learning on the open university. 

Pits coming together well and it’s building my knowledge to and inspiring me to to make more accurate kits and fill holes to male things perfect. Keep it up 

[trickyrich]

hmm I wouldn't go that fair, most of its me faffing about with my obscure fascination with all things resin...almost a fetish.....opps I didn't say that!!! 

 

All the fun and fast stuff of sticking things together now comes to a screaming halt now!!  As now the not so fun part of tiding everything up begins, so progress maybe a bit slower from now!

 

Photo’s are now completely out of order to what has been done! I undercoated everything then remembered I forgot to take photos   …..so bear with me.

 

These intakes are going to be the death of me…… I’m now up to the 5th time of adding filler to try and remove the join lines….really it’s quite a simple task but I’m somehow messing it up each time. 

 

 

Eventually the intake ducts will be painted flat black. I also have a sneaking suspicion that the mouth of these is the wrong shape! I think the opening needs to be smaller and have a bit more of a lip on the bottom, have no idea how to do this so may just leave it.

 

The drop tanks were pretty crap and needed a lot of work to get to this stage, I still need to do some more to them, I added some PE detail to the fill points, I still need to make some supports on the pylons. Plus you can see the new locating pins for the tanks.

 

 

Some of the other parts cleaned up and primed, I need to clean up the insides of the airbrakes a little bit more as they suffered moulding issues.

 

 

Ok the under wing joins came out really nice so I don’t have to worry about them any more, just finish off the panel lines there. 

 

 

Same goes for the exhausts, I just need to freshen up some of the detail around them.

 

 

The nose gear area looks pretty good for now, I need to finish and fit the intakes before I can complete this area.

 

 

The cockpit area is fine as well, I’ll drill some holes for cabling on the back panel then paint this area black.

 

 

It’s looking ok here. Though now she’s covered in filler again, had panel lines redone, then repaired all the incorrectly placed panel lines, added more filler! 

 

 

Have a feeling there’ll be quite a bit more of this to go before I can start to paint her. But with it being only 2 weeks into the GB I’m pretty confident this build will be completed.

 

I know I shouldn’t get distracted, but this baby showed up on Friday, I’m resisting the urge! Another edition to the ever expanding stash!

 

 

[Col.]

Your resin fetish does produce some rather lovely results Rich and this one is looking to be no exception

Some nice additions to the stash as well

[Colin W]

I have to say that you're making a very good job of this. Whilst I have not made a Colectair kit I have seen a few and can appreciate the challenges. 

It will be a rewarding experience to see it finished. 

 

Colin 

[trickyrich]

Slow progress on her but it’s still progress.

 

Ok the continuing saga of the intakes…….more sanding and I’m almost ready to say they’re done……almost! Will be the death of me!

 

Right I need to get the cockpit done so I can close it up. I made the new section behind the seats and all is sort of ok…

 

Now the canopy has 2 rather large bits of framework running under the canopy. Collect-Aire supplies these bits of framework and nothing else! From what I’ve seen there’s quite a bit more to this including some structure that also has the crew head restraints attached to them. None of this of course is included…just like the rear “parcel tray”! Normally in plastic this would be a really simple job to do…but with the 2 resin bits it took me a couple of hours to do this.

 

The basis just to get the spacing right.

 

 

Then 2 hours later….

 

 

…..with canopy in place…sort of....

 

 

Around this stage I remembered I need to adjust the seats….. The backs were to upright (vertical actually), these should be inclined slightly. They weren’t ejection seats but a sort of a framework, so some REALLY careful grinding was required here. A test seat back in place on the LHS. There was an escape shut behind a door between the seats that lead to a duct out of the bottom of the aircraft. There was a plan to use this space to drop special forces operators out of on missions, don’t think they had many volunteers for those missions!

 

 

Ok after some paint and it all looks rather good, just need to add some details and that’s done.

 

 

Doing all the painting at once saves time….

 

 

That’s it for 2 weeks, I really want to get this canopy one, it’s the one major issue I have left to finish…the intakes are easy, just need to finish the ducting.