1/48 Trumpeter F100D

[Nik W]

Evening all!

Being a relatively new member on Britmodeller, I'd been a bit shy in posting anything, but finally decided to take the plunge and go for my first Work In Progress build - Trumpeter's 1/48 F100D.

Even though the kit decals did provide a rather nice looking NMF Super Sabre, I couldn't resist buying Xtradecal's sheet for the 'Triple Zilch' a/c, and just because I'm a glutton for punishment, I opted for the Aires Resin Cockpit, which while it looks lovely painted up, is a nightmare to fit.

So here we go!

Basic construction taken care of:

Still several small bits and pieces to do to the u/c bays and airbrake but I was keen to get cracking so left these for now.

Overall everything has gone smoothly so far with the exception of the Aires cockpit, which in order to actually fit the fuselage required a lot of scraping, sanding, filing, swearing and squeezing, until I eventually gave up and decided to leave the resin sidewalls out and just settle with the tub itself!

That's all for now, but hopefully get a good deal more done over the next few days.

Edited January 12, 2011 by Nik W

[dimitris]

You've done an excellent job so far!

[Nik W]

Relatively slow progress on the build over the past couple of days, mainly focusing on the undercarriage itself and the undercarriage doors.

Starting with the undercarriage, they were given a coat of matt white to act as a base. On top of that a wash of watered down Tamiya Smoke to give them a grimy look, and then drybrushed again with white. I prefer the dirty worn in look to an aircraft and its components, so while some might argue I've overdone the weathering a little, I always prefer the aircraft to look like it hasn't just rolled out of the factory.

The tires still need a light drybrush of grey to bring out the detail, but with regards to the rest of the undercarriage I'm pretty happy how they turned out.

The undercarriage itself was actually surprisingly accurate, the only thing missing being sections of the brake cables on the lower end of the struts themselves. This was easily replicated with the drilling of a couple of small holes and the addition of some fuse-wire running over the torsion links.

The only other work done so far has been to the insides of the undercarriage doors themselves. I've seen several images which show differing colours for the insides, some showing natural metal, others an interior green, but since the aircraft itself will be natural metal, I chose green to inject a little bit of colour (that and I couldn't find any reference pics of the undercarriage specific to the aircraft in question).

These got an overall coat of interior green (the closest match I had available) and again a wash of watered down Tamiya Smoke (whoever came up with this stuff was truly a genious! It makes weathering bits such as this so easy and gives great results) and dry brushed again with the interior green. The cabling and various bits were picked out with a light dry-brushing of silver and the addition of a couple of red cylinders so that it wasn't entirely green.

It doesn't seem like I've made much progress, but getting all these fiddly bits out of the way will, touch wood, speed up the rest of the build.

Nik

[Rob C]

Looking very very good! Great attention to detail in your painting and I love the look of the wheel struts.

[andy hood]

Looks very good so far !!

[Icarus]

Blimey! What on Earth is that background on your first photo?

[Nik W]

Evening All,

Slow progress over the past few days due to my airbrush going the way of the Dodo. Speaking of which, can anybody help me out with this, its an Aztek A470, but it started leaking air from the body recently and now it won't even spray thinners.

Anyone know where I can send it in the UK for repair? (under the lifetime warranty) Or do I have to send it all the way back to Testors in the states?

If anyone could help I'd really appreciate it, would let me get back on track with the several models in various stages of completion right now!

Nik

Blimey! What on Earth is that background on your first photo?

Icarus - Don't judge too harshly, thankfully that delightful background is one very old and very worn mattress - I was washing my bedsheets and it was the best lit flat surface I could find!

[Nik W]

First post for a few days now, replacement airbrush arrived, so I've been able to crack on with the painting. A rather satisfying layer of Halfords grey primer went on first, and revealed very little in the way of touching up to be done. A small miracle really! The biggest problem came when I knocked it off my desk and broke one of the wings off, so out came the green putty (which you can see in the first pic) to repair the damage. Frustrating but not the end of the world.

I thought I'd start off with one of the trickier parts of the Super Sabre - the tail section around the afterburner can. Everyone know's these got pretty hot, so much so they eventually stopped painting these areas on the aircraft. I was keen to see the effects different primed surfaces would have on Alclad, so I decided to test out a couple of patches. One section was masked off and given a few coats of Klear to create a glossy finish to apply the Alclad over and the rest of the section was left in the Matt Grey of the primer.

Out came a selection of Alclad paints - Aluminium, Duraluminium and Gold Titanium.

First up the entire rear section was given a base coat of aluminium.

The flash on the camera burns it out a little bit, but if you look closely you can see the difference in the shades of the panels. The section nearest the exhaust itself being a little lighter, as the result of the further away section being given a coat of Klear.

Next up some Duraluminium was sprayed randomly along the panel lines to create some darker areas and start to simulate the discolouration caused by the heat.

Again it's a little bit burnt out by the flash, but at this time of year, the light isn't strong enough to get good daylight pictures.

Lastly (for today anyway) some Gold Titanium was sprayed on again on random panels, but trying to keep it in between the darker Duraluminium panel lines.

Reference pictures show the metal took on an almost straw like colour in some parts due to the heat so while the photo doesn't show it too well because of the flash, it has given it that straw like colour.

Next up will be some layers of Hot Metal Sepia, Hot Metal Blue and some Burnished Exhaust when they arrive from Hannants! Thanks in particular to Peter Marshall for his work in progress build of his Super Sabre, which provided much of the inspiration for the 'hot end' of my Super Sabre!

Nik

[Metallicus]

Looking good!

[robw_uk]

great work..... love the NMF - great example....

[periklis_sale]

WOW!!!

very nice work on the metal!

[POMPEO]

nice job on the metal parts, looks great...looking ahead for more

cheers

[Nik W]

More progress on the exhaust end of the jet. My box of Alclad related goodies arrived from Hannants today, so out came the airbrush once more!

Carrying on from the work that had been done previously, the first step was to spray some Burnt Iron around the section closest to the afterburner itself as the majority of photos of Super Sabres show this to be very dark. Next up I mixed some of the Burnt Iron with an old almost empty bottle of Aluminium and into the mix went a few drops of Hot Metal Sepia to try to recreate some of the brown-ish/purple-ish discolouration around the hotter areas on the back end. Once this had all dried Hot Metal Blue was quite liberally added to the previous mix so I could get the blue-ish shades frequently seen.

This left me with a lovely rainbow coloured back end to my Super Sabre, but the contrast between the colours was far too harsh in comparison to the real aircraft, so over the top of this went a very thin coat of Pale Burnt Metal. Not only did this soften the contrast between the blue-ish areas and the browny/purpley areas, it added in the straw like colour which seems to be common to the back ends of a lot of natural metal Super Sabres (a rather nice little accident I'd say! )

Only the one pic of the finished product as I was keen to crack on rather than bore everyone with a blow by blow account of every colour I'd sprayed over the afternoon!

As you can see, a nicely discoloured back end to my Super Sabre!

Next up comes the dreaded gloss black finish prior to some Airframe Aluminium. This is my first attempt at a high gloss finish using Alclads so if anyone has any tips as to how to get the best results, please do share them!

Thanks for looking folks!

Nik

[FTW]

Can almost feel the heat and smell the fuel!

[Nik W]

Afternoon all,

Another busy couple of days worth of modelling done with. Made some fairly big steps over the past couple of days so its finally looking like the real thing rather than a grey lump.

First on my list of things to do was the gloss black primer for my Alclad Airframe aluminium, but not before I'd masked off everything that wasn't to be highly polished - the exhaust area, the darker panels on the wings and the cannon ports in the nose.

Followed by two coats of Alclad Gloss black primer.

Not the most exciting of pictures, but this stuff was much easier to use than I'd been expecting. No problems at all applying the stuff, and it dried within a couple of hours.

Once this was dry it was time for the Airframe Aluminium to go on. This was a fairly brave step, in my rush to make progress, rather than testing the stuff out I jumped head on in and started applying it to the model itself. Not quite as easy to apply as the gloss black. The aluminium seemed to clog my airbrush pretty badly and went on very cloudy in patches (perhaps this was due to me doing something wrong? Anybody any pointers?) but once it had dried I was able to buff out the cloudy areas using an old soft tea towel.

The most satisfying part of the whole finish is the contrast between the polished aluminium sections and the heated, discoloured metal around the exhaust, it looks a hell of a lot better than it did on its own now!

Despite this being my first attempt at using the highly polished Alclads and the little snags I've run into, I'm really impressed with how easy this stuff is to use and the results that can be achieved even by a complete novice with the stuff like me.

Up next will be some fiddly bits like fuel tanks and undercarriage doors - in my rush to play with the Alclad, I did my usual trick and forgot to do these bits all at the same time as I was doing the rest of that colour! Doh!

Thanks for looking folks!

Nik

[Peter Marshall]

Looking nice and shiny now - glad someone paid some attention to my Hun too.

[jgrease]

Nice build - looking forward to more!

[Nik W]

Afternoon all,

First update on this for a little while. Progress has slowed down a bit due to various things happening over the past couple of weeks. But thankfully not ground to a complete halt.

A quick bit of polishing really brought up the shine on the NMF, which while it isn't exactly like a mirror, looks much more like all the reference pics I have of Super Sabres from around this time. I wasn't entirely sure how to go about applying decals to this as I'd seen conflicting reports about decals going straight onto Alclad finishes, and wasn't sure about sealing it with Klear as I'd heard this quite often dulls the finish, but I took a bold step and went for it and thankfully the results haven't been too bad.

Decals went onto the surface like an absolute dream, and with a couple of coats of Micro-Set and Micro-Sol have really adhered to the contours of the a/c and the panel lines, which was something of a worry as there are several very large decals such as the big red lightning flash and the tail markings.

Next up was adding the photo-etch parts of the Aires cockpit set to the canopy itself, which was surprising easy, although the canopy hooks on the bottom were a bit of a disaster, mainly due to their incredibly small size and my big fingers!

The final pic shows the canopy sitting placed on after painting.

Not much left to do after this, some final decalling, leading edge slats need painted as in the picture above they're still in primer, as do undercarriage doors, pitot probe and IFR probe but finally approaching the finish with this!

Thanks for looking folks!

[Calum]

Looking really good there

[Nik W]

Afternoon all,

While since my last post but major progress has been made, all the little fiddly bits added and the final decals on. Just a couple of pictures to show the progress.

Here it is, everything on (leading edge slats, undercarriage, airbrake, IFR probe, Pitot tube and Drop Tanks) and last few decals added.

I decided against weathering it with my usual mix of Oil paints, mainly to preserve the Polished Aluminium finish (which is delicate enough) and also because, this being the squadron commander's a/c it would probably have been kept in relatively good nick anyway.

All in all a relatively quick, painless build, took just over 6 weeks start to finish.

More pics of the finished article in Ready for Inspection.

Thanks for looking folks,

Nik