One of my other hobbies in addition to model building is toy collecting. I don't go crazy trying to get it all but being a child of the 80's there were the big 3. Star Wars, Transformers and G.I. Joe. As my parents were not made of money I had to pick and choose. G.I. Joe was left out.
Now as an adult I am filling in the (rather large) gaps in my Star Wars and Transformers collections. I have also been getting the G.I Joe stuff I thought was cool as a kid, which for me was the aircraft. My friend had the Cobra Night Raven which was the coolest! It was like an SR-71 with a manned drone and it was huge! This was finally added to my collection a couple years ago after which I found out there was an opposing variant from the Joe side in the form of the chrome plated Sky Raven. It is a bit on the rare side, even rarer with good plating but I finally got one today. The problem is for whatever reason Hasbro decided to release this version with out a drone which is complete bollocks to me. (Just like their Walmart re-release of the G1 Optimus Prime a couple of years ago. Without the trailer!)
So here's where the modeling skill comes in. As I am not satisfied to just sit back and take it from Hasbro, I decided to remedy the situation and make my own from a spare Night Raven drone. The problem is how do you replicate a vacuum metallized finish? The answer came from my friends in the automotive modeling community and that answer is...MOLOTOW! I have all three sizes of the Liquid Chrome pens, but they also sell a refill bottle. The filler tip is removable and you can just stick the siphon tube of your airbrush right in the bottle so you don't waste any transferring to other containers. (Just be sure to prop it up so it doesn't tip over. The bottle is tall and skinny and it isn't cheap!) I did not thin it and it is thick enough that you can spray it on heavy (you want to do this) and it won't run. I only used one third of the 30ml bottle on this so you could probably get two or three really shiny planes out of it! I think the results speak volumes!
7 attached images. Click to enlarge.
