tomcat21

Holy cow great work! That is some serious patience.

I've been thinking a lot about the 'Raptor / Lightning Sheen" and for the F-35C I will just go with normal colors until the decals are sealed. Hopefully I'll do a better job of color matching and won't require many 'fading coats'. As final coats I think ill use the Ironbreaker with a slightly more glossing clear. The model just looks that little bit too dull to me, I think it'd be nicer with a bit more glossy finish.

Just find a shop that sells Perspex. They normally make great display cases out of it too. I just got a bunch of tapered lengths about 8 inches long cut and polished the edges myself with sandpaper down to plastic polish. Then I carefully drill holes each end and screw them to a piece of wood, and to the bottom of the model. Then with a carefully aimed heat gun I gently warm the Perspex until it starts to bend. It happens quickly and you have about 5 seconds to position the model how you want before it starts to go solid again. I have 2 F-14s, a Super Hornet and now the F-35 all flying in p

Thanks Wolfgun! Here is my Lightning 2 right now sitting on the table at the Brisbane Model Expo: It's strange how building a model changes your perspective. The F-35A used to look a bit squat to me, but now I see it as a sleek thing of beauty. Building and painting it felt more like building something out of a Star Wars movie than a real aircraft. Am happy to see it parked next to a Bi-plane too, 100 years and the evolution of aircraft is truly remarkable. The Hasegawa kit is a perfect gift for a youngster too. It's a tough kit, simple and very satisfying.

Thanks Nicholas you're support and ideas have been very welcome! The bases are just simple bits of wood with sheet Perspex cut into strips, sanded smooth/ polished. Then I use a heat gun to bend them and place the aircraft in flight. The kit comes with a clear plastic stand which I haven't assembled. It looks to be adjustable and of good quality.

Oh forgot to mention one last dumb mistake I made. The inner canopy frame should be black. I, for some unknown reason, decided to scrape the paint off then glue it so the canopy inside so it appears grey. You can see my mistake in the photos above. So yeah, paint the inner frame black and only glue it at the bottom points of both sides.

The exhaust nozzle was painted with buffing metaliser and glued to the aircraft. Here's a shot next to a Hasegawa F-14 In the display cabinet. A fantastic new addition.

Alright, mixed some light grey acrylic with Vallejo clear flat and gave the Lightning 2 a coat. The colors lightened nicely and the greys evened up but I lost any semblance of a metallic sheen. I decided to take a gamble and mixed some Vallejo Satin finish with the Citadel Ironbreaker in an attempt to put an all over metallic sheen back on. It was very hard to gain the courage and I was only able to because of how fast and easy this build has been. And the results? I'm very happy and think the sheen looks awesome. From some photos I've seen the sheen does look to be all over, even on th

Yes I definetly had trouble lining some up with the panel lines underneath. The bigger decals were the main culprits. However it was 2am when I was putting these on and I tore one or two trying to move them back and forth. This build, while being primarily for fun and to make sure the F-35 is represented at my local show, has been a great learning tool for the C model I will invest more time in. This thread is also a storage place for all my lessons learned. I thought about trying to mask and paint all the lines but having seen how complex it all is I doubt I would ever have the patience for

Painted the canopy frame today, decided to try another shade of grey to try and nail the decal grey for another future attempt at the F-35C. Tamiya XF-66 is closer being bluer but too dark. Glued the canopy on with Krystal clear and gave the entire model a coat of clear gloss. In this pic you can see the decals Vs XF-66 color match. I'm not worried as my other paint is out, just hoping the flat coats smooth things out a bit. Has to be finished tomorrow for the weekends model show.

Got home from evening shift and spent 3 hours putting on all the decals. They are amazing and respond well to Mr Mark Setter which is essential to get some of them to conform to the curves. From this photo you can see that the decal grey has a bluish tinge that makes it look more like a compass ghost grey color like FS36320. I doubt it will matter too much as my clear coats will have base color/sheen that will lighten all the colors and hopefully blend them in more. At this stage I'm a little worried that my metallic main color is too dark, but it looked fine before the clear gloss so am

Ok, time for the special metallic sheen color! I invested in some Citadel acrylics that have been recommended by a few folk for the F-22 paint sheen. So here goes the experiment of on the fly mixing to try and guess it right. First a coat of straight "Leadbelcher" metallic: Now with a dollop of "Dawnstone" and Abbadon Black. There's two different mixes in this pic, I went too dark and had to lighten back a bit. Finally got a color time I was happy with. At times it looked a bit flaky and I found you had to do a good wet coat to make it look good: Tamiya X-22 clear gloss went over the

There are joins mid-way on the bottom of the elevons and inner fin surfaces that are significant, hence the large amounts of putty in those areas. It's a race against time because I want to put it in a model competition at the end of the week, purely so people can see how nice a kit it is.

Thanks mate much appreciated. Slapped some filler here and there, sanded and painted a base coat. The instructions say FS36270 is the lighter grey colour which Testors Model Master calls Neutral Grey. The main colour is a weird metallic grey which looks different in every photo I've seen. I've got a deletion of the Citadel paints that have been recommended for the F-22 sheen so I will experiment and see how close I can get. The masking up is the most tedious part so far..

Awesome you will love it, it's probably the most fun kit to build I've ever done. Plus it's the first time I've ever not had any reference apart from my ipad. I just goggle on the spot -'F-35 seat' and you get loads of great photos.

Cockpits all together, some photos using sunlight. I tried to get a gold tint on the pilots visor like the real helmets. It's not too bad looking indoors, from a distance, with the canopy on. The main instrument panel looks neat. This must be a great jet to sit in, the cockpit looks very interesting.

Finally I am on night shift so my photos will be in natural light. I'm just using an iphone 5 to take the photos so sorry they aren't as professional as others on here. Here's the canopy assembly with the two-piece framework installed. From reading another forum the bow is necessary for bird strike requirements. The fine metal cord is a detonation cord I believe because the seat goes through the canopy. As mentioned earlier there is a decal for this that looks OK on the sheet but am not sure if I will attempt it. Here is a photo of the 2-piece instrument panel with it's decal installed a

Hi Aggressor, thanks for the info. A F-35 crew chief answered the question for us- "We call them AME's and they are in fact radar reflectors as to what Milli posted. We normally fly with them on, but on certain missions we take them off. If you want the model in peace time, I would leave them on. But if your doing a combat aircraft before a mission, leave them off." Hi Paolo, the kit supplies a decal to replicate the metal cord you speak of in the canopy. I will try it out and see how it looks.

Here are pretty much all the parts and decals that make up the cockpit, this should be easy! The canopy is a smoke tinted one (kit supplies a clear as well) so it should be hard to see the cockpit well, hence I won't be going to much trouble here. This lazy build is just what the doctor ordered for my modelling enthusiasm. I'm having a lot of fun with this kit.

Thanks guys, am probably just going with the kit supplied decals just to keep it OOB. I got a reply about the bumps and they are indeed "Luneberg lense RCS enhancers" or radar reflectors that would not be fitted to combat ready aircraft. Here is what my F-35 friend posted: "We call them AME's and they are in fact radar reflectors as to what Milli posted. We normally fly with them on, but on certain missions we take them off. If you want the model in peace time, I would leave them on. But if your doing a combat aircraft before a mission, leave them off." Here's the pic I was linked to: htt

Things are rolling along nicely and the two fuselage halves are now glued together. My favourite aspect of modelling is the appreciation you get of an aircrafts shape from building a model of it. The biggest surprise I have seen in the F-35 is the nicely curved wing, it really demonstrates the jump between aircraft that were designed in the 60s/70s compared to those designed nowadays. I was also impressed at the apparent dihedral on the horizontal tails. Here is a link to the real aircraft for comparison, I was initially worried my model had warped. http://www.air-and-space.com/20081023

Painted the inside of the intakes white and glued them together then stuck them in the lower fuselage half. The plastic of this kit is very high quality and hard. There are some ejector pin marks in the intake (which I didn't fill) but it's such a snaking intake that I doubt they will be very visible. The intake assembly joins the fuselage in what I thought would be a disastrous seam, but this kit is so high quality the fit between parts is fantastic with minimal work. You can dry fit whole sections and they just sit happily together with no glue.

Hi friends, I'm coming off of a 2 year battle with the Trumpeter 1/350 USS Lassen with a bunch of photo-etch so am looking for a fast and easy out-of-box build. I have chosen the F-35A Lightning II by Hasegawa. It looks great on the sprue so hopefully I can do a decent job whilst just enjoying throwing it together.

You're right I can see that in my Tornado walkaround video at 00:15

I had to cut a hole in the back of my display cabinet to accommodate this beast!