spejic

I have limited pictures of the Strutter cockpit, but it turns out other Sopwith two-seat aircraft had similar structures in the cockpit so I modified the kit parts to match that information. I cut up that ladder floor part because it only goes in the front seat when the back seat has a gunner, and added spacers under it because it is supposed to be a little bit higher up. I added the side control wheels and the control stick to this little substructure that would just slide into place. And then when I was about to install it I dropped it and then accidentally stepped on it. The seat and control stick are no more. Ah well, at least the kit comes with two of those. Back to the beginning.

Are you questioning my patch?

I have a patch that says I am a member of SG-7, as shown on the documentary Stargate SG-1. Maybe patches don't mean much. Except mine. That one is real.

It's not a Japanese show. It's the Japanese show.

What you really need is helicopter netting on the sides, as are seen on LHD's and other helicopter carrying ships. The problem is that no one makes a photo-etched fret of just (or largely) those. I know because I've been looking for my Academy ROKS Dokdo and can't find it. You would need to get multiple copies of set that contain lots of rails and a little helicopter netting.

That looks incredibly art-deco.

I glued together the fuselage halves because I couldn't properly do the cockpit floor while they were still separate. But before that I drilled some holes and put in the control lines to the tail. I used very fine fishing line which goes in one hole and out the other. The plan is to do all my painting and then drag through some fresh line and then glue it all down, a technique that worked pretty well in my last WWI aircraft. It turns out the airplane has a wooden floor, so I used the wood technique on very thin styrene. When I found myself being careful not to crack it along its fake grain I realized I did a good job. I also made the control wheel by sanding down and reaming out the part of the kit that allows the spinner to spin free. I guess I'm gluing that sucker down now. The metal-painted bits are the fuel tank in the front and a metal box between the pilot and observer that I believe was the bomb bay for bomber variants, but in this case will just hide that support bar.

I love it. Lighting starships up just makes them so much more finished.

You can get Evergreen round stock down to 0.020 inches in diameter and Plastruct down to 0.010 inches, so you shouldn't have any problems. Even modern radar masts can be done with the 0.010 stock and look good on all but the smallest ships (I used stretched sprue for the radar mast on my USS Gemini).

Now that the oil paint has dried, I did a gloss coat, a wash, a heavy brush of light tan pastel, and a dull coat. Bracing wires (stretched sprue) have been added, as well as the throttle. I guess I will add throttle wires too, since it's simple enough. Next job is building the fuel tanks. I'm going to cut off the back half of that upper fuselage part to open the back seat. While one of my kit boxings included a upper fuselage part with a Scarff ring for the rear machine gun, the TV aircraft uses some kind of custom rig that doesn't quite match that so I have to start from a blank canvas. I don't know what kind of instrument panel the real Strutter had, but we get a view of the TV aircraft's instrument panel here: I've made a decal design that matches that.

Why not use styrene? You can get stock of the right thickness, and then you can glue all the platforms and decks to the tripod much more easily.

I hope this is nuclear powered. What can be more awesome than a nuclear powered zeppelin. Airbrush the main color, brush paint any sub-colors, and use a fine point pen (like a Pigma Micron 0.05) to draw in the windows. Attaching rotor blades should be the very very last thing you do. If the rotor blades were regular styrene, I would sand them thinner with a flat sanding block, but clear styrene is too breaky.

That's probably because they are in your browser's cache. I don't think you can use Google drive as a picture server. You can try Imgur, which is what I use.

I painted the interior of the fuselage Tamiya Buff, which helped me determine that Tamiya Buff wasn't the right color. But I'm going to leave it in order to darken up the cockpit a bit and make more contrast with the interior wood bracing. I then painted the bracing MM Light Flesh Base and then brushed on some burnt sienna oil paint to make it look slightly wood-like. I'll wait a week until the oil paint dries, spray some gloss coat, and then give it a wash to clean things up cuz that oil stuff is messy. I painted the propeller Tamiya NATO Brown for it's first step. I also did the wood effects for the various bits in the cockpit (seat, stick, floor bracing) but I didn't take pictures of those. I also tried painting the bottom of the wings with various colors to see what I should use and it looks like that MM Light Flesh Base is pretty close to linen.

Are you going to keep the small pylons, or install the regular F-16 set?