Day 6

Alrightey, here are the promised pictures. I now have the varnish I need to start applying the decals, so maybe... just MAYBE I will be finished in time. Tonight I will try to get the varnish applied and MAYBE get a few decals stuck on. Still not sure if I want to go with a yellow or blue nosecone.

Day 5 - frantic work

So a brief break from the tidying and packing today was when I decided to "test" my new Tamiya acrylics and see how they worked. Based on advice from AlFront over at War Diaries of a Little Englander I copied the pattern from the Airfix instructions in pencil and painted the same pattern. It worked. Far better than I was expecting it to. Nice that this build has taught me another little trick for my bag thereof.

The current state of the plane is: fully painted, with the pilot needing to be done and then the decals added, weathering and wash to finish.

The chances of me getting all this done before going away for the rest of the month on Tuesday are: slim.

Pictures to follow tomorrow, when I have some light. [UPDATE] Pilot is finished and glued into place. Now I just need to do the nosecone (which requires buying more paint...) and get varnish to start on the decals.

Day 4... slowdown

In a stroke of absolutely terrible luck it has been raining very very gently all week. Just enough that I haven't been able to spray the plane until tonight. This means that I'm behind my self-imposed schedule and I'm running out of time fast. I may need to take emergency measures and declare the first two weeks of June to be May.

Day 2.5 & 3

Most of this was done in a little under two hours yesterday, with the tail wheel and the wing doors being fitted today. It's now ready for painting so time to get researching on patterns and paints. I think (but am not 100% sure) that Vallejo Russian Green and GW Fortress Grey will do the job nicely. The green lines are splodges are GW's new "Liquid Greenstuff" filler. It works okay for this kind of thing, but for bigger jobs I'd have to go with the manual mix stuff. As you can see, the pilot and canopy are not attached yet. I'll be painting both seperately and gluing them on after the kit is ready for decals. The propeller is currently spinning but with a distressing wobble, so I might glue it into place later. I'm also not 100% happy with how the wing doors went together, and the right wing sticks up a bit more than I'd like so it may be filed down some more.

Day 2 of the Weatherbuild

So my estimate of about an hour's work would have been correct for a straight out of the box build but for a wheels up version with a fully painted pilot it'll take a bit longer. Closer to two hours at the moment and I still haven't worked out how to get the landing gear to fit into the body in a way that doesn't stick out all over the place or fall in too far. Another thing I noticed is that it's best to switch parts 11 and 12 from one wing to the other - either the instructions are mislabled or I was reading it totally wrong but the flaps just seem to fit better on the opposite wing. No pictures of progress, but here's the sprue anyway: You can clearly see that there are bugger all parts here.

OH GOD A POST... I mean... Hawker Typhoon unboxing.

It's been ages since the last post. Sadly life got in the way of fun, and then it got MORE in the way of fun. Even though fun eventually got back on track, I haven't really bothered using that new camera for the purpose I bought it....
Anyway, to business! For the Hawker Weather event build I decided to get back to work and get cracking on an Airfix Typhoon 1b for some Allied air support (not that there was much, on the day). As usual, click for bigger.


The box is the usual Airfix affair. Good artwork but not a lot of clues as to what exactly is inside.



The sprues in the bag. The initial reaction of "that's not a lot of parts at all" turns out to be correct: there are just 30 pieces here. One of them is a pilot, which is a definite plus. It looks like this will be a quick build. I might time myself tomorrow evening and see if I can do it in under an hour (I am a superglue heretic). Then it's just a matter of figuring out which colours I have and which I need to do this bird justice.

Bonus in picture: part of "the stash" - an Airfix Cromwell awaiting assembly, even though I already have two more than I need built....