Sebastijan

Bringing this topic back to life - Mitja's picking up his work again so here's a tale of some legs 🙂 While there's nothing wrong with GWH's landing gear struts, they always look so better when you add some wiring to them. Mitja's: I have used 0.2mm lead wire for most of the wiring and various bits and pieces. The landing light was drilled out, painted in chrome given a black wash and then filled with clear UV curing resin, which I think improves the looks quite significantly.

Thanks mate! I am joking that if nothing else price per working hour ratio is very good compared to some easier assembling kits 😄 Thanks buddy! Yeah, it requires lots of elbow grease to get it together - actually it feels like building a standard short run kit but with Tamiya quality surface details. 1:144 Valkyrie? Please do tell more.

I almost have trouble believing I managed to bring this build to this stage. With all the fitting issues, I was losing my mojo big time and was seriously thinking of just quitting it a few time. But I persevered and here we are! She's primered up with a coat of Mr.Surfacer and it is funny how all you need is just a coat of grey paint and all the troubles with the build so far, just sort of disappear! Anyhow, fun stuff ahead and I hope modelling gods will grant me troublesome build ahead.

are you sure this is better than RV/KP one fitwise? I was on the edge of binning the kit, as nothing fit as it should. But yeah, the details are much nicer and sharper than the beforementioned kits.

The struggle continues. I have finally added the wings and the leading edge extensions - wings fit nicely but the extensions again needed putty and filling. The resin exhaust's fit was also poor - while I managed to attach it, following the upper (most visible) curve it created quite a step at the bottom, which I tried to at least reduce slightly using Mr.Paint's putty. Oh well, at least it is starting to look like a 23 now!

Having both of these in stash, I am following your work with interest! Nice work so far!

Since painting the area between the fuselage and the splitter plates is hard to reach when assembled, I've decided to paint those areas beforehand. The tip of the splitter plate was masked and painted with Anodized Aluminium. Now the whole bunch of problems arose - The complex nature of the kits fuselage breakdown caused fit issues. While the sides of the fuselage were somewhat cooperative, the upper part defies a good fit. It is interesting that the pieces over the intakes fit perfectly yet both the central piece behind the cockpit and the rear fuselage behind the wing box appear

You may have seen the product in my last post but Uschi van der Rosten's Three Green product is simply awesome if you need noseweight in tight places... For a swept wing option, Clearprop suggests adding 10g of weight in the nose and it's not a very voluminous nose, so adding additional weight in the form of this product in combination of fishing weights provides more than enough of it, to prevent a nasty tailseater! By chance I also discovered my favorite new "putty". Most of you probably know, CA or "super" glue can act as a filler, but most of these glues, when dry, become hard as a ro

Kiitos, Jan! Since I will be doing the wings fully swept configuration, the recommended weight in the nose is 10gr. To be honest, there's not really a lot of place in that nose, so I'll be combining the usual lead fishing weights with Uschi van der Rosten's Three Greens product. Unfortunately as it is apparent from the last photo, the first fit issues start showing up - I cannot get a nice clean joint between the lower part of the fuselage and the fuselage halves - the gap appears almost identical on the other side as well.

Thank you, Rom! The details are amazing but it is not an easy model to build - will get to that really soon. Finished the main wheel wells over the weekend. The detailing is really nice, but due to the limits of plastic moulding, more details can be added. Looks decent out of the box but looks even better with some additional wiring.

setting up Discord server is free, but it takes time... I'd do it for ARC but at the moment I am just way too busy.

With holidays done and dusted for a small progress update Front wheel well features nice details and goes together really well.

Thanks mate! As promised a new finished sub assembly of this build - the exhaust pipe. The interior of the exhaust pipe is made of three main pieces. I don't really like such arrangement as it will inevitably leave three seam lines down the tube, which are next to impossible to remove without loosing detail. And as you can see, the detail is exquisite. Unfortunately the many little holes are not afterburner nozzles as I've though initially, but actually green painted domed rivets or something similar. The nozzles themselves are actually even tinier but not represe

Thanks, mate!

And there's Gripen

Let's take a look at the KM-1M ejection seat. As I'll be doing a 1980s Soviet bird, the seat was painted in blue-grey colour with light grey textile covers, which had a tendency to dirty up during the use. The kit seat is made out of several plastic parts, photo-etched harnesses and a couple of stencil decals for the headrest. The footrests were a bit thick, so I sanded them lightly. The trickiest part however is building the main harness. It is made of 3 parts - the central crossed straps plus the over the shoulder straps. Catch is that you actually have to guide certain stra

I was very intrigued when Clearprop announced their new tool MiG-23 kit in 1:72 and with its release in early April, I managed to get one at Moson show in Hungary. Since there's very few builds or reviews that I've seen so far, I've decided to do a build review of the kit. Starting with the cockpit, the kit uses a combination of Photo-etched and plastic parts combined with decals. It requires some time to build all the layers but the end result is a really cool looking and busy cockpit. For example - the instrument panel is a basic shape, to which you apply instrument faces decals

The problem I see doing the complete cockpit setup is that you are tied to one airframe only by doing so. I am currently designing "key boxes" for my use - basically some rotary and ordinary two or three way switches connected to a USB board which you can then keybind in the sim itself. Since I fly VR, these generic boxes will improve the tactile feel as I won't have to spend time with head down searching for frequency rotaries etc. Oh and since this thread opened with F-14 DCS announcement - Heatblur is coming with the mighty cat to MSFS as well!

Decals time! We both used the old VF-decals sheet covering VF-101 birds amongst others. While I had reasonably few issues with these and only a little bit of silvering, which was taken care of with Daco Strong setting solution, Mitja on the other hand had bigger problems - some severe cases of silvering which required grey paint overspray to hide it... but in the case of USN F-14s, that's a norm and he did great I think! Mitja's bird: Mine:

Haha he looks way too relaxed to be running around 😄 maybe a match of volleyball later in the afternoon 😄 and thanks! Thank you, Gremlin! Thank you, Rich!

Thank you Greg! I still consider myself a beginner figure painter but I really like how these little fellas turned out for my F-14 vignette. Pilot and RIO were slightly modified to fit into GWH F-14D. And last but not least, if you are debating whether or not to purchase rather expensive Reedoak figures - they are top notch quality and a worthy addition to your model display!

what paint did you use for the upper parts? looks quite warm in tone compared to the usually rather cold FS35237

Very nice job, Greg! Was lucky enough to see this bird in person!

Looking good! Waiting patiently for more shots!

Thanks, Steve!