621Andy Posted April 2 Share Posted April 2 Quote Stay with me folks I'm going to get this one finished before August! Which year?🤣 Lovely work though...Starting to look like a proper Mirage😍 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SteveMc Posted April 2 Share Posted April 2 It’s all looking good Steve. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bandsaw Steve Posted April 2 Author Share Posted April 2 2 hours ago, 621Andy said: Which year?🤣 TBA… 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bandsaw Steve Posted April 5 Author Share Posted April 5 Rapid progress. Sometimes I just get a bit reckless with these projects and when I do I find things go much faster. Perhaps I've just been 'needled' by the somewhat pointed and entirely valid comments above regarding my lack of speed. 😄 In any case, I do seem to have put a few runs on the board recently. 🤔 Earlier this week I decided that ready-or-not the time has come to stick the missing cockpit wall in place. In order to do that I had to start by squirting some black Tamiya rattle-can paint about as shown below. While waiting for the paint to dry I thought to myself 'I wonder how the rest of this blotchy and uneven-colored thing will look when finally painted? So - before I knew it - I had masked off some of the black paint, cleaned off the metal with a cloth dampened with few drops of isopropyl alcohol and sprayed a couple of coats of grey metal etching primer. Here's the result. I think it looks quite encouraging! I only sprayed the top half though because there's still a bunch of detailing to go in the wheel wells and it will probably be much easier to work on unpainted surfaces. Here she is from another angle. It's obvious that the big hole in the side of the cockpit really does need to be filled, but it's equally obvious that it's far easier to put the final components of the cockpit into their final position before closing up that sidewall. The last components are an ejection seat, an instrument panel, an instrument panel shroud and all of the 'guff' that sits above the shroud ahead of the pilot. Here's the result. This is probably sufficiently inaccurate to make any Mirage III guru cry; but to hell with it - I'm trying to make rapid progress! Blading putty and sanding was used to conceal the join where the new wall met the rest of the fuselage and with a squirt of more black paint the result was satisfactory. I think it looks OK from a distance. Now I rolled the thing on it's back and started working on the guns. How to deal with the guns has worried me for a while because I really was not sure how I was going to position and align the gun barrels so they weren't aimed point-blank at the underside of the nose. As you can see I carved out two big trenches where the guns can sit... and then epoxied and milli-putted the short visible lengths of gun-barrel into position carefully lining them up so that they can just be seen from directly in front of the aircraft, thereby proving that firing them is not an act of suicide. Now came the really tricky bit. How to make the extremely elongated oval reinforced housings that surround the gun troughs. @hendie once said something like 'ovals are hard to make' and I would have to agree with him on that. These look shocking! So bad in fact that the top one got re-made and the bottom one (about 80% complete in this photo) probably should have been scrapped as well. it was only saved because I was running low on out of copper and still did not really know how to make the next one any better. Here a bit of folded / rolled-up sandpaper is being used to 'ovalise' the gun troughs. These are far from perfect but I'm pressing on regardless. I used copper for this because I figured it would take the slight compound curves better than Aluminum lithoplate and, being a bit thicker, might withstand the handling better. I think it was the right choice as in the end the result is not toooooo baaaaaaddd.... as long as you don't look closely. Hopefully the overall 'racy' appearance of the jet from this angle will distract the eye from the rather 'agricultural' gun troughs. Right now I'm pretty happy with how this is looking. Next comes the canopy. The canopy's vac-forming molding 'buck' is already well underway and will be the subject of the next update. Like I say - I'm putting a few runs on the board at the moment! Best Regards, Bandsaw Steve 15 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bandsaw Steve Posted April 5 Author Share Posted April 5 By the way, if you are enjoying this project then you might like my contribution to the NATO 75 Anniversary Group build. Here's the link... 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
621Andy Posted April 5 Share Posted April 5 That looks fantastic! I didn't mean to rile you about how long it was taking, but having said that progress has been swift😋 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bandsaw Steve Posted April 5 Author Share Posted April 5 Rile away, I don’t really take any of this that seriously! 👍 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ArnoldAmbrose Posted April 5 Share Posted April 5 2 hours ago, Bandsaw Steve said: Like I say - I'm putting a few runs on the board at the moment! Go for six!! (I don't actually mean hit the MODEL for six 😁). But yeah, I've often found that a model can appear to stagnate while all the component parts are made, and one can't do this until one has done that, and one should really do the other first! Then the bullet gets bit and it can come together quite quickly. I'm no expert in any aircraft but the detail in the cockpit looks good, it looks very busy. And with some paint on it looks like you'll complete the innings soon, declare. (I'm not really a sports guru, particularly cricket, but I think I've got the terms correct?) 🙂 Regards, Jeff. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hendie Posted April 5 Share Posted April 5 Nice update and nice progress, Steve. "Ovals"? You've got a better memory than me. She does look nice with some clothes on now, even if it's only her underwear 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CJP Posted April 5 Share Posted April 5 Looking very nice Steve Chris 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SteveMc Posted April 5 Share Posted April 5 More great progress Steve. I would have given up a long time ago 😂. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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