F-117A 1/72 Revell Kit - FINISHED!

[Scargsy]

Bit of a last minute entry, I'd been planning to do this in the GB but hadn't managed to start till now, let's hope I can do it in a week and it doesn't end up in the KUTA build!

It's typical Revell instructions, A4 booklet...

The kit is pretty low on parts (not always a bad thing)...

The cockpit is a sparse affair, but at least it comes with a little pilot, not my greatest painting but probably be difficult to see him anyhow...

So in order to make life difficult (probably) I've decided to attempt to model the plane in flight, sometimes a difficult proposition based on fitment of undercarriage doors, luckily the front gear door seemed to have a snug fit.

The rear doors needed a small amount of fiddling but I got them in, normally I'd like to reinforce the back with some styrene sheet or a bit of sprue but the whole bomb-bay and wheel wheels is a single tight fitting piece. I ended up using some filler to help hold the doors and fill some of the gaps.

The kit has a lot of nice big fitting locators as can be seen.

The clear parts are a single piece that fits from the inside, so the windows are flush, I masked them up as well as possible first, but the angles aren't tight so hopefully I got then close enough and can remove them post paint!

There are only a few main parts (underside, topside, 2 halves per wing and a single tail piece) so the main construction was pretty fast, the only issue being given the angular nature of the beast it's hard to fit clamps!

So it's been a very quick build so far, though I need to do some cleanup where I managed to make some glue fingerprints near one of the undercarriage doors!

 

 

 

[Jabba]

A quick build indeed. Do not rush too much as a 2 week extension has been granted by Enzo.

[Scargsy]

So in a final flurry I've managed to get this finished by the deadline (I hope it's this evening/midnight?)

 

Had a bit of a nightmare with the paint - I was using Alclad 2 black primer (with a touch of their white primer in to grey it) but my airbrush decided to start spitting towards the end, leaving blobs. I let that dry then sanded it back smooth however black on black plastic made it difficult to see what was paint and what was back to plastic! So another coat went on - though again it's hard to see what's new paint vs old also I don't pre-mix the paint so it's a guessing game with the ratios! Anyhow it went on a bit better though I still needed to smooth a few bits with some very fine finish paper.

 

Decals went on, though I seem to be suffering a fair bit of silvering on the clear parts, I know people say to clear coat first but I never have much luck with clear (see further down!)

Also I noticed my undercarriage doors weren't greatly aligned at the back, but not much I can do now...

I left off some of the tiny decals as I really couldn't get on with them!

I applied a coat of Tamiya clear but for the life of me I can't get this to airbrush on 'smooth' just grainy droplets (maybe I could try some self leveling thinners but I get the impression that might eat decals), in order to try smooth it out I brush coated some thinned Microscale clear on (maybe in future I'll just try brushing clear instead).

Once dried I rattle canned some Tamiya flat-clear over everything before giving it a dark-grey 'starship filth' oil wash.

You can see some of the 'texturing' here on the nose...

Anyhow after flatting I gave it a rub down (again) over the worst parts and the flat+washes seemed to help a bit but as can be seen it's still more bumpy than I would like!

Overall a pretty easy kit to assemble but getting a nice finish proved tricky (you wouldn't think that given it's monotone!)

[Jabba]

Well done in getting this one finished.

[exdraken]

Fantastic Nighthawk!

That was nearly Science Fiction back then...