OlCabour's Hangar

Before the weathering, I applied a layer of satin varnish.

Paint chips are made with an old Pale Prey miniature paint (which have a beige tint). It is a water-based paint, which can be corrected, or removed easily (that is not possible with Gunze, Tamiya or Lifecolor paints).

A new coat of satin varnish to protect them, then dirt and streaks are made of with a medium gray oil paint. Over the white, it looks dark, almost black.

Then a final layer of satin varnish.

The canopy is masked.

It then received a thin coat of primer, followed by black to give texture.

Then it is covered with Alclad stainless steel

Then dirtied with dark gray.

I had to use some wax polish here and there to remove some alclad stains, who had managed to go under the tapes (which can be seen in the previous picture).

The navigation lights are finished, with sanding of the optical fiber bits.

Then the base is painted Steel.

The upper engine is isolated from the cabin with a single sheet of paper, technical openings are masked, and a glossy black is applied.

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Then a coat of Alclad steel.

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The engines then received Alclad jet exhaust.
A burnt metal effect is done with pale burnt Alclad.
The guns are also painted steel, and shaded with jet exhaust.

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The guns were a bit dark and will be lighted with Alclad aluminum (no picture)

The inner side walls of the cockpit does fit properly to the cabin near the headrest. They are glued with the help of tweezers.

The slice is not pretty with 2 layers, so they are covered with a thin strip of Plastic, then painted.

There will be later some decals to apply here (before the final bonding of the canopy).

On the wing, the broken navigation light is repaired with a bit of fiber optic shaping and glued with the model glue. It was a test, and to my surprise, after a night of drying, this works !

Two holes in the front of the cockpit are partly visible when the canopy is installed. Since they do not correspond to any pin, they are filled with plastic bits.

I got a upgrade kit from a friend (thank you Marc) that includes a more detail bottom back panel, and 2 photoetched ejector handles. The resin parts are nice and very well casted, and the photoetched ejector handles are superb. In my opinion, it will be better to switch the two resin pipes to some metal rods so they do not inadvertently break.

The ejection photoetched handles are quickly installed. they are bent a little to allow a tight fit on the curve of the cabin.

I thought I would not use the resin plate on this assembly, as I feared it breaks with the handling of the nozzles parts (which will remain removable). But after starting masking the nozzles, the black paint started to come off (it seems I forget to wash this part, and some releasing agent is still there)

So as I have the strip the paint, an idea came to me to install the detailed resin part white the rigidity of the nozzles part.

The paint stripped off.

The original part is hollowed.

Then sanded along the edges to reduce the thickness. To avoid to too much sand the frame, I also sanded the back of the resin part along the sides.

The part is a little too long, so I had to sand about 1 mm at the top and bottom, taking care that the holes for the pipes are still usable.

And with metal rods

The bonding is reinforced from behind with a heavy dose of cyano charged with resin dust. This makes a big block, ugly but super tough. And like that requires a good dose of cyano, ca heater for a few seconds during the taking!

This is installed. The operation took just over one hour (without paint stripping).

The technical parts of the upper reactor are painted black (citadel spray can), then it is installed in the slot without gluing.

all the wires are all soldered together. Luckily there is a lot of room inside the model to fit the big spaghetti plate !

You can see that an optical fiber had broke during these manipulations. I hope it will still light correctly with a transparent plastic cap glued on...

Little tests with the nozzles dry installed

Given the poor seams, I expected to have lot's of light leakage, and luckily, it is far less serious than I thought, and only focused on the round nozzles bases.

For 2 below nozzles, a spare tube is added, and this completely solves the problem at this level (even without gluing the nozzles)

For the top one, the back disk and the flange are completed and then covered with black paint.

These tips are sufficient to solve the problem of light leaks, so I will finally not glue these two parts (upper engine and nozzles), in case I need to have hand in the future.

Some seams will then stay as is but should remain little viewable in the end (I think the eye will ignore them).

The plug is more firm as I expected and perfectly fulfill its second office : support. Even upside down, it works