Thanks, John@johnb and Spiros@fiveten. I made some progress on the build but still short of the camo. First, I did masking with some quite poor Eduard pre-cut masks. These were OK for the windscreen but badly shaped to the canopy lines.
Lots of time and work to fix them. Finally I got the interior color for the canopy painted. I carefully masked off the intakes with masking tape for that stage. Prior to that I had spent a long time masking deeper inside the intake using Tamiya tape and balsa wood plugs.
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1. I had to shape and insert these plugs carefully so that they didn't push in too far and also remained properly aligned and removable after painting. Tedious work.
2.
I needed to do that for the application of the camo, in order to create a nice demarcation line between the white of the intake trunk and the exterior color. No other way to do it (that I could come up with) when the intakes were already assembled and painted inside. Same process to come for the Super Etendard intakes. I am still on the fence about doing a red trim on the intake lip as it doesn't seem to appear on photos of Falklands/Malvinas War A-4Bs.
Next, I did the red interior color for the flap and speed brake assembly, top and bottom.
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1. These parts are incredibly fragile and have to be repaired frequently when handling.
I tried to do some pre-shading and black-basing to bring out the detail. It worked fine but it deepened the red color a bit. Not necessarily a bad thing as there would be variations on the red in these areas on the real thing. In all the painting and finishing so far, I have broken off the pesky extensions that hold up the leading edge flaps many times. I guess that's inevitable when they are so delicate and stick out so far. The still look OK after repairs. Next up is to mask these areas for some pre-shading and then the underside blue and final topside camo work. that will be quite a bit of airbrushing. I am working with my Christmas present, a new compressor with an air tank.
It works very well, so far and I am hoping the lack of a pulse in the airflow will improve spray patterns for fine camo. I did some other work on the S.79, B5N2 Kate and Lynx, which I will also be posting today and tomorrow. Here is the box with all the small parts to be finished at once.
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1. B5N2 cockpit components
2. S.79 engine faces and cockpit details.
3. Cabin padding and seat details for the Westland Lynx.
That's it for this build today. Now to post some details about the Lynx in the Helicopters GB. Comments welcome.
