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OK, I was going to wait, but I couldn't help myself. I decided to build this little model early in the GB. I saw something on Facebook; it was information about these decals.

0eXIXXn.jpg

 

The guy calls himself "Fishbone" for his company name, from Malaysia. I was astonished by how quickly he produced these decals, only months after the demo scheme was revealed. I ordered the decals from him, and they arrived from Malaysia not too long ago.

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I will be using the venerable old Hasegawa kit for this.

tA9xya3.jpg

 

A sneak peek at the decals. Deliberately off-axis, to help protect Fishbone's copyright.

Z88GvyZ.jpg

 

ALF

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21 hours ago, Trojan Thunder said:

It is a striking scheme ALF, will you be adding LEX fences and bird slicer antenna on the nose?

 

If I have time I might build a twin seater in the standard scheme, I have a few CAF sheets in the stash.

Love this scheme. I had a chance to poke around it in a hangar in Bagotville during a book launch for a friend's history of the Base. It is a beautiful finish up close, and looks wonderful in flight. The LEX fences are included in this kit, and yes, the bird slicers are required, as is a new-style GPS antenna. Some scratch building will be required for the latter two details. Stand by for stress-induced tremors... :crying:

 

What scale would you do the Dual CF-18 in? If you need any help for anything at all on the CF-18, just ask. I know a thing or two about them... :sunrevolves:

8 hours ago, AX 365 said:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.  Love the text underneath the Tamiya XF-10 Flat Brown bottle.

 

Good luck with this one buddy.

:cheers: Thanks Mike, I need a bit of luck. The biggest challenges for me will be:

1. Getting super clean demarcation lines between the red, white, and grey

2. Blending the brown into the red, and getting it the right size (fuselage top and outsides of tails)

3. Scratch-building the GPS antenna. The CIT (bird slicers) should be fairly easy to do, especially in this scale.

 

ALF

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3 hours ago, ALF18 said:

Love this scheme. I had a chance to poke around it in a hangar in Bagotville during a book launch for a friend's history of the Base. It is a beautiful finish up close, and looks wonderful in flight. The LEX fences are included in this kit, and yes, the bird slicers are required, as is a new-style GPS antenna. Some scratch building will be required for the latter two details. Stand by for stress-induced tremors... :crying:

 

What scale would you do the Dual CF-18 in? If you need any help for anything at all on the CF-18, just ask. I know a thing or two about them... :sunrevolves:

....

:cheers:

ALF

 

 

I have a 1/72 Hasegawa kit in the stash,  after watching the Jetstream series (which I now own on DVD) I decided I had to do a Canadian twin tub, all the more better that an Aussie was on staff as an instructor.

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13 hours ago, Trojan Thunder said:

 

I have a 1/72 Hasegawa kit in the stash,  after watching the Jetstream series (which I now own on DVD) I decided I had to do a Canadian twin tub, all the more better that an Aussie was on staff as an instructor.

Cool. Yes, we always had an Aussie on exchange. A welcome bit of spice, I might say! Two of my very good buddies moved to Oz to fly Hornets around 1989 or so. The RAAF was offering any qualified CF-18 pilot to emigrate to Oz, and giving him the same rank, seniority, and years of pension, plus pay for the move and sponsor his citizenship. I came very close to taking the deal myself; I love Australia, especially its climate. Spent a week in Canberra when I worked for Bombardier as an instructor on the Challenger 604, teaching groundschool to the RAAF VIP squadron pilots.

While I was there, I visited one of those guys, who was retired by then from the RAAF. He was flying business jets during the week, and flew vintage jets at Temora on weekends. Canberra and Sabre at the time. Had a beautiful house on a golf course. Summer (for a Canadian, we call any time of year where the snow is less than 5 cm deep summer) year 'round. Perfect.

 

Will you be doing an older version (which fits the Hasegawa kit nicely), or modify it to the upgraded version?

ALF

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Maybe a partial upgrade, will have to refer to my 'references' see what config they had during filming. i will have to dig the kit out and see what I have to do.

 

I used to work at 34 (VIP)SQN and when the Challenger was being offered as a Falcon 900 replacement I got on a flight sitting down back, with one of our pilots having a go at the controls. We made an interesting touch and go down south (at Albury) where the RAAF pilot almost drove the gear through the wings when he didn't flare!

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On 2017-07-19 at 9:10 PM, ALF18 said:

OK, I was going to wait, but I couldn't help myself. I decided to build this little model early in the GB. I saw something on Facebook; it was information about these decals.

0eXIXXn.jpg

 

The guy calls himself "Fishbone" 

A sneak peek at the decals. Deliberately off-axis, to help protect Fishbone's copyright.

Z88GvyZ.jpg

 

ALF

How did Mr Fishbone treat the Jim Beliveau/DND copyright ?

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3 hours ago, Snowbird3a said:

How did Mr Fishbone treat the Jim Beliveau/DND copyright ?

I'm sure he used images that were in the public domain (i.e. published on Facebook). I don't think DND or Jim have a copyright; the only thing they can do is control to whom they give drawings and other detailed information.

Do you know differently?

ALF

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This model does not have a built-in means of drooping the flaps and ailerons, so I decided to make it with canopy closed and pilot inside, engines running. Therefore, I needed to make the pilot, Capt Kutryk (our newest astronaut's little brother). I had the pleasure of meeting him with his brother Josh at Bagotville a couple years ago. I had previously worked with Josh while I was instructing at the CF-18 simulator complex in Bagotville, but I did a bit of a double-take to see a Captain with the name Kutryk, who wasn't Josh... then Josh the Major showed up and introduced his brother. Nice to see two nice guys succeeding so well, and working together. They are privileged.

This dude looks much better in person... :rolleyes:

9lFMIdX.jpg

 

At the same time as I build this kit, I am also starting a Kinetic 1/72 Hornet, so I will provide some comparisons between them as I go along. Look for the details and pics of the Kinetic kit in this GB, in another thread. One thing that is better about this kit is that it comes with decals for the instrument panels.

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Here is the cockpit, assembled and ready to go.

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This is a relatively quick kit to assemble. Top and bottom fuselage halves.

gFC70vE.jpg

 

Looking a lot like a CF-18. Boy this scale is small! I'm not used to such small kits any more.

ALF

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One of the challenges to this aircraft is it has the new-style GPS antenna, which is a round plate aft of the cockpit, but forward of the blade antennae. It is about this size - at first I considered using the sprue name identifier, chopping/trimming it to be nice and round.

6s4iFfC.jpg

 

Then, as I hunted around in my spares bin, I found a 1/48 Hornet ID light glass. It is perfect, and even provides the two-level appearance of the real antenna (albeit not smooth like the real one, but hey, this is 1/72!). Part number 11 on this clear sprue.

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I like the way it fits the bill.

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Primed with light grey Tamiya primer. Now for the hard part, the fancy, bright scheme.

huga805.jpg

 

ALF

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Oh, forgot to mention a little experiment I did before priming. This aircraft has the CIT antennae (AKA bird slicers) on the nose. The kit does not have them. Tiny parts. I toyed with the idea of using slices of dental floss, cut up and glued with Elmer's clear glue. After fiddling with it for a while, I gave up on doing this at this stage. When the time comes, I will hack up some little bits of either toothpick or dental floss, and glue them in place. I'll do that at the end.

KbD6YvY.jpg

 

Another side note. The LEX (Leading Edge eXtension) fences are provided (good news) but the holes for locating them are not present (bad news). I chopped off the locator pins, and just glued them in the right places.

H5Hu8no.jpg

 

Here's how I painted this so far. First, the primer. I find the Tamiya light grey rattle can is a perfect match for the bottom colour, FS 36375. I then painted the false canopy, using Modelmaster Acryl FS 36118. The AM decals from Fishbone work very poorly if you want to have the gear down, and I am not a fan of the way decals work for CF-18 false canopies even in the best of circumstances. I used AX_365's technique of masking with medical tape cut into thin strips, and masked off the proper shape for the false canopy. For whatever reason, the Modelmaster paint pulled up after I masked it for the white coat... I ended up brush-painting some touchups later than this stage. I think my paint was too thinned after multiple airbrush uses, or maybe not well enough mixed. Stuff happens. :angry:

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The other thing I am doing here is masking off the wheel wells, so I can spray the white into the wheel wells and onto the gear struts. I hate white; it covers very poorly, so I used Tamiya white primer for this.

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Here is the raw result after the white was sprayed. Some of the white ran; the rattle can is hard to control, so as I tried to get adequate coverage, I was impatient and allowed it to get too thick and runny. I did some scraping and cleaning up after this stage, after I took this picture.

IMNrq6N.jpg

 

I have now masked for the red. Two things to note:

1. Fishbone's painting guide is not 100% accurate. Have a good look at pics of the aircraft. For example, the colours of the missile rails (they are actually FS 36375, not white or red). There are other areas where the decal instructions are a bit off.

2. See the areas where the white has oversprayed from the bottom, and as I added the touches required to the top of the aircraft? I left them like this when I sprayed the red. Big mistake. The red does not cover well, and the white areas showed up like dogballs. Oops.

Kus2wqB.jpg

 

After trying a couple coats of red, and still seeing the problem, I sprayed the whole red area with grey primer, then redid one coat of red, and at least it was uniform.

I used Tamiya Acryl X-7 gloss red for this.

2skjPcn.jpg

 

More soon. Thanks for dropping by.

ALF

 

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Nice progress with the paint ALF, I always make sure any red or yellow areas I am going to paint have a uniform base colour (I did it with my CH-149 as I had used white filler on yellow plastic) as from past experience I had the same issues as you.

 

For my white painting, I use Tamiya XF-1 thinned 50/50 and slowly layer it to build it up. I have also been there and done that with the Tamiya white primer, don't know how many times I got carried away and had to sand/strip a model and start again. I will get it right one day!

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18 hours ago, Trojan Thunder said:

Nice progress with the paint ALF, I always make sure any red or yellow areas I am going to paint have a uniform base colour (I did it with my CH-149 as I had used white filler on yellow plastic) as from past experience I had the same issues as you.

 

For my white painting, I use Tamiya XF-1 thinned 50/50 and slowly layer it to build it up. I have also been there and done that with the Tamiya white primer, don't know how many times I got carried away and had to sand/strip a model and start again. I will get it right one day!

Great tips. My own impatience caused these problems. These are things I knew, forgot, and relearned... Good thing they're not fatal errors.

 

Next step after fixing the red was to figure out what colour to use for the darker areas on the centre fuselage and on the outsides of the tails. The instructions from the AM decals said to use Tamiya Brown. When I saw the pics on FB of his finished prototype, I found the colour to be too brown. It looks more like a burgundy to me. To test, I tried two colours: Brown, and Red Brown, from Tamiya acrylics. Here is a test shot on the unused external fuel tanks. The top is brown, the bottom is red brown. Virtually no difference, and too brown for me. Looks like I'll have to custom-mix something.

sCcUutG.jpg

 

I decided to use mostly red, with some red-brown (about 1/5 by volume) mixed into the red.

Ai8uf3u.jpg

 

Turned out to be a pretty good burgundy colour. I masked off the areas that will be burgundy, and tried to feather out the colour a bit at the edges. The masking ensured no contamination outside the area to be sprayed. I then removed all the tape, and found (ick) lots of runny red and other problems to be touched up.

rsAzTHj.jpg

 

Maybe not quite black enough, but I couldn't be bothered to fix that.

hdIgqlu.jpg

 

Like I said, lots of touchups necessary.

pIINQhF.jpg

 

2tNx8AU.jpg

 

More soon.

ALF

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2 hours ago, phantom said:

keep at it, hope to do this in 1/48 so I watch your colours with interest.

Who is doing those decals? You'll definitely want to make the dark colour more black. I'm guessing about 33% black, 20% red brown, and the rest red.

ALF

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2 minutes ago, ALF18 said:

Who is doing those decals? You'll definitely want to make the dark colour more black. I'm guessing about 33% black, 20% red brown, and the rest red.

ALF

Kinetic is releasing this in 1/48. And it looks like the shaded area is included as part of the decals..if I read the instructions right...

20248241_829894317177681_599627032997112

 

 

I really want this but can't justify the expense...

 

 Sean

 

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Just now, martin_sam_2000 said:

Kinetic is releasing this in 1/48. And it looks like the shaded area is included as part of the decals..if I read the instructions right...

20248241_829894317177681_599627032997112

 

 

I really want this but can't justify the expense...

 

 Sean

 

Nice. That will be much easier. You can afford it! :)

ALF

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Thanks again for posting those, Sean. The shaded areas are done with what looks like a grey overlay. Further proves my point that the ideal blend is more black and red than brown and red.

ALF

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4 minutes ago, ALF18 said:

Nice. That will be much easier. You can afford it! :)

ALF

can  you please call my wife and explain that to her!!! lol..

 but in all hoensty, I have enough kits that need to be built..Ill wait a few years then struggle to find this on the used market..as usual.

 

 Sean

 

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3 hours ago, Grandboof said:

Awesome colour scheme Great work so far 

Martin H

Thanks man! I've been looking at that Kinetic one in 1/48. I LOVE the decals it comes with. Just might have to spring for that boxing!

This one is proving to be a bit of a challenge, with the masking required.

ALF

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