Jump to content

Sebastijan

Members
  • Content Count

    5,973
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Sebastijan

  1. 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:

    DSC_0555-X3.jpg

    DSC_0557-X3.jpg

     

     

    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.

     

    f14wip-18-X3.jpg

    f14wip-21-X3.jpg

  2. On 10/3/2023 at 2:56 AM, Falconxlvi said:

    Worth the effort Sebastijan!  I’m following closely and have enjoyed your updates.  Thanks for posting 

    Thanks mate! I am joking that if nothing else price per working hour ratio is very good compared to some easier assembling kits 😄

     

    On 10/7/2023 at 7:49 PM, Berkut said:

    Just stumbled upon the thread and great job with a challenging kit Seb! I have been eyeing this kit too, but i think i will skip it for now reading your updates.😅 (Dat 1/144 XB-70 tho has been calling for me though...) Fantastic work so far and looks like pretty decent detailed kit, just shame about the challenging fit. Looking forward to see paint on it now that you are over the hump.👍

    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.

  3. 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.

     

    mig23wip-31-X3.jpg

    mig23wip-32-X3.jpg

  4. 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!

     

    mig23wip-28-X3.jpg

     

    mig23wip-29-X3.jpg

     

    mig23wip-30-X3.jpg

  5. 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.

    mig23wip-24-X3.jpg

    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 too long. As it appears, this will now be the hardest part to solve. As I am leaving for a short weekend trip to Netherlands and Belgium (Any of my followers going to the Kleine Brogel airshow?) expect the next progress update next week.

    mig23wip-25-X3.jpg

    mig23wip-26-X3.jpg

    mig23wip-27-X3.jpg

     

  6. 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!
    mig23wip-19-X3.jpg
    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 rock and are really tough to sand. Here comes the VMS Black CA glue. This thing dries up nicely but unlike other glues, stays relatively soft and thus easy to sand. In combination with the recently acquired DSPIAE curved sander, it's a combination hard to beat on rounded fuselages. I only have to rescribe the details around those dreaded side gaps.

    mig23wip-18-X3.jpg

    mig23wip-23-X3.jpg

    mig23wip-22-X3.jpg

  7. 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.

    mig23wip-12-X3.jpg

     

     

    mig23wip-11-X3.jpg

    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.

     

    mig23wip-13-X3.jpg

  8. On 8/15/2023 at 6:38 PM, rom said:

    great work! i think I will buy it, details look amazing

    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.

     

    mig23wip-17-X3.jpg

     

    mig23wip-21-X3.jpg

     

     

    mig23wip-16-X3.jpg

    mig23wip-20-X3.jpg

     

  9. On 7/21/2023 at 10:05 AM, Thadeus said:

    Nice one. I hope they do the MF's. Nice work on the cockpit. Love the headrest.

    Thanks mate!

     

    As promised a new finished sub assembly of this build - the exhaust pipe.

    mig23wip-7-X3.jpg

     

    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 represented by the model. The flame holder that you can see are actually made of 3 PE parts carefully bent to get the required 3D shape.

     

    mig23wip-9-X3.jpg

    Dryfit of the three pieces showing the nastiest of the seams. I guess it won't be as noticable when glued and hidden in the dark shadows of the exhaust 😀

     

    mig23wip-8-X3.jpg

    Remember my first experience with annealing Clearprop's brass? Well for this round ring around the inner exhaust nozzle, I just had to use annealing. Armed with slightly thicker piece than with seatbelts and knowing the potential danger, I cautiously approached the open flame with this part and then quickly quenched it in a glass of water. And it worked! No damage to the brass and it became silky smooth to bend in circular shape.

     

    mig23wip-14-X3.jpg

    With the whole assembly completed I was really satisfied with the result. The PE made flame holder, fit perfectly as did the inner nozzle with that PE ring. I've painted that green and played with oils to give it that scorched burned look - I've used White, Starship Filth, Buff and Payne's Grey oil paints for the effects.

  10. 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 straps of the central part through the small half-loops on the shoulder ones.

     

    My initial thought was - hey let's anneal this thing and the brass will be soft enough to make this happen. So I lit the small tea candle and as soon as I approached the flame with the part, it immediately turned bright orange and part of it fell away... WOW! So I tried another one carefully and again the part wanted to deform, but I was fast enough to save it. I am not sure what kind of material ClearProp used for this etching but be aware. I eventually rebuilt the lost part of the strap and somehow covered and bent the rest.

     

    mig23wip-1-X3.jpg

     

    Apart from that incident, painting and weathering went smooth and I got a really nice looking seat in the end.

     

    mig23wip-4-X3.jpg

     

    mig23wip-5-X3.jpg

     

  11. 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 then glue the PE framing over it and on top of that a second set of decals that cover all the various knobs, displays etc. And of course in the end, you add the tiny levers for gears etc. The only thing I add was the throttle handle, which is missing (there's only a slightly embossed circle on the throttle quadrant).

     

    mig23wip-3-X3.jpg

     

    mig23wip-2-X3.jpg

  12. On 6/23/2023 at 11:07 PM, Delanie said:

    I'm trying to fly an F18c in DCS and the level of detail in the controls and switches is truly impressive having just spent a lot on thrustmaster hotas and pedals and had to buy a new monitor not because of the game , the one my friend gave me so i could work comfortably from home during lock down kept blanking recently even with my dodgy work laptop, i'm sticking with the free facial recognition software but i'd love to be able to build a full cockpit with all of the switches etc 

     

    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!

     

  13. 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:

    DSC_0470-X3.jpg

    DSC_0469-X3.jpg

    DSC_0471-X3.jpg

     

    Mine:

    f14wip-19-X3.jpg

    f14wip-20-X3.jpg

  14. On 6/25/2023 at 5:21 PM, Thadeus said:

    You should totally add legs to the WSO. He would be running around on the tarmac making 'woosh' noises.

    Very nice figure painting though.

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

     

    22 hours ago, Gremlin said:

    amazing job!!!

     

    I m stay tuned 

     

    cheers

    Thank you, Gremlin!

     

    21 hours ago, RichB63 said:

    Top notch work! 👍

    Thank you, Rich!

  15. 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!

     

    f14wip-29-X3.jpg

     

    f14wip-30-X3.jpg

     

    f14wip-31-X3.jpg

     

×
×
  • Create New...