Global Scale Modeller

The decals do let it down a bit, very thick...they make Tamiya's look like Cartograph!


It also came with a new feature that I had never seen before...should be a real time saver...pre-silvered decals!


I will be sending an email to Freedom, but being a new manufacturer I'm willing to cut them some slack. I was thinking about making masks and spraying what I could anyway, between that, trimming off the unneeded carrier film, and the clear coats it will get I should be able to salvage these...but seriously, why not just outsource this to Cartograph and charge $5 more for the kit?

The surface and detail is quite nice


One thing that I can already tell will be an issue with the kit is the sprue gate attachment points, they are large and in several areas intrude into areas where pieces will interface (mainly the wing joins...not good since the whole damn thing is a huge wing). This will require some very careful trimming and sanding as to remove enough to allow proper fit without removing too much and creating gaps. Complicating matters is the fact that the plastic is pretty brittle.


I noticed another issue with the nose. Here it is dryfit (note the visible damage from the poorly placed sprue attachment):


but the real aircraft does not have these lines and steps


Looking at the first steps (landing gear construction) I noticed the tread detail in the drawing and reference photos, but completely smooth tires in the kit...I wonder if there is a resin replacement set...


The main gear pieces all have pretty nasty seam lines that I will need to sort...


I've been looking at the intake, it's such a prominent feature, very complex masking and a seam to take care of. The intake behind this ingraved line needs to be white, fuselage color in front. This will need to be painted and masked before assembly...


...because after assembly it will be buried inside the plane, inaccessable.


This seam does not exist on the real plane, CA and a tricky sanding job is in the cards.


This lip is meant to help alignment and provide a gluing surface, but is it preventing the piece from coming up high enough to be flush with the rest of the fuselage. Just as well the detail needs to go, I have a feeling there will be quite a bit of sanding going on up front.


so it had to go


and thankfully, it solved the step issue


I spent some time on the landing gear, removed all the molding seams, applied some lead wire, tape strips and copper bolt heads made with my hex punch set plus the PE pieces provided (tiedowns and catapult arm actuators)




And then paint


I love this color but Model Air really clogs up my brush...I'm just going to make a custom mix of Tamiya for the future...I had to clean the brush 4 times to paint these pieces!

Thanks for looking!

I'll be following this build with interest

rgds
John(shortCummins)

Hi Jason, nice decals

how did you make the bolts exactly ? - they are cool!

Aliktren-

I've got a UMM punch set, I used 0.2mm brass sheet which is too thick to use with the rubber block provided...it just rips the metal instead of punching it, so I used it right on the corner of my mat. The Zebra print on the hammer is optional






I need to get some copper sheet or lead, that would work better, the brass is a bit too hard

I Pressed on a bit more today...

Looking again at reference photos, the main gear doors (like the F-15) are closed when gear is down, only the door that needs to be open to allow the gear to remain down stays open.


A quick test fit on it's wheels to make sure it's level...all good!




Most builds I have seen have both sets of doors open, careful test fitting showed I could still place the gear with the front door closed so I pressed on closing them up. Oh dear...


The other side was not much better. A bit of sanding and trimming off hinge locating tabs and interior detail was needed. Combo of me getting a bit heavy handed with the sander and not test fitting frequently enough has left me a bit of a gap to fill...card to the rescue!






Another bit of unnecessary detail, a panel line on each flap that does not exist in reality.


Stretched sprue seemed the best choice to fill, as it would require the least amount of sanding so I wouldn't risk gouging in a trough, and unlike melted sprue it will set up quickly so I can sand these down before October. A bit of a faff at first, this sprue is VERY thick and difficult to stretch...the key was heating it a bit more than usual before starting the pull. I went thru all these plus some that I binned rather enthusiastically before I cracked it.


That's more like it!


A drop of TET and they will be left for a while to make sure they are completely set before meeting the sanders.




There was a bit of an ugly join on the wing root that will be visible with wings stowed so I covered it with some card


Till next time!

Looking over details before I button up the halves. I think this is an APU exhaust,


the hole may or may not be visible once the cover is installed so I filled it with some tubing


Just a few mm...I made sure it was not long enough to interfere with the fuselage fit, it cuts very easily with a craft knife...this will give some depth in case it is visible


and an additional piece of the project came today


along with some of these Tamiya masking sheets (just large sheets of Tamiya tape) Lucky Model had it pretty inexpensive so I chucked one into the cart with the deck tractor.


My plan is to use either this or frisket film to make masking stencils even though I should be getting a replacement decal sheet. My wife is a paper crafter and has one of these


Its a crafting plotter, using a computer you can make designs and cut them onto pretty much anything. I've had a little play with the software and think i have it figured out, a quick test with printer paper looked good...

The exhaust area is much easier to mask than the intake so I went ahead and painted it today. But first, the seam...my preferred method would be to line the intake with card, not possible I think with this. I tried mixing up a bit of Milliput and applying it to the seam. Then with a water moistened cotton bud, smoothed it over.


Then the color, Alclad burnt iron and jet exhaust over black primer. In the interest of showing warts and all ...



I'm going to need to try the Squadron Green technique instead [frown]. This really is not that visible without the flash though...we'll see...

I can't put it off any longer, the halves meet! No looking back now...


I had to remove all the locating tabs because of how they interfere with the fit, i twas a bit of an exercise to line everything up and an extra hand would have been helpful...that's why no step by step photos. Some parts of the join will need some touchup. I left the halves clamped together for a couple of days then checked the fit. It was pretty good on the back and left side, I forced the fit in these areas at the expense of the fit on the right. My thought being better to have 2 areas that need no touch up and concentrate any filling on one area. I ended up with a small gap that ran the whole length of the fuselage, since it was so small and I wanted to sand as little as possible to preserve the shape I pulled out the green Squadron putty and let it dry for a day before sanding.


There are more dodgy joins around the tail, they got the same treatment. These would not have been a problem, but I am going to drop the flaps so they will be visible.






Since paint will be the next step I have been looking at reference photos...the color will be the standard USN Light Ghost Grey. The challenge with that will be getting some variation and interest in the finish to break it up a bit so it doesn't look like a brick. This is an excellent reference shot, I've highlighted things I want to replicate.


I'm not going to preshade the panel lines on this because if you look at the picture above again you will notice that the panel lines are not darkened in that manner. Instead, I am using a dark color primer (black in this case) and picking out panels with other colors to provide the different shades. After a good wipe with IPA on went the Stynylrez.

The wings will be stowed, but the attachment points are very small and I think the only way to guarantee a strong gluing at the correct angle was to put these pieces on at this point and slip the tab into the fuselage when the time comes. I'm seeing some filler I forgot to sand down...


The surface detail is very nice and from what I have been able to find, fairly accurate.




Some of these antennas look a bit too flat, should not be too big of a project to punch out some metal or styrene to augment them.


The endless filling/sanding/checking process with the nose has not been in vain




I am going to mask off several panels and paint them various shades of white/grey, and although I've never had this primer lift on me I have put down a light coat of Aquagloss as some insurance.

I got some work done on the deck tractor while all the filler was drying on the plane.

One sprue, maybe an hour putting this together






These jaws were a bit too narrow for the front gear, a bit of a mod and it will fit much better (could not fit the wheels in here before)




Thanks for looking!

The wheels finally arrived a few days before the cutoff for me to escalate my PayPal dispute to a refund.



But still an issue...one set (small/big) is ever so slightly ovoid...I'm at the end of my rope with this and am thinking of just calling this a $12 lesson well learned. They don't really look that bad and I did test fit them and you can't tell unless you directly compare.

I had some time tonight to sit down for some quality time with my Infinity. I lightened and heavily thinned the Light Ghost Grey (Model Master 4762) and further mottled the panels, pretty much exactly what I was hoping for. I had a seam open up (or I missed it before priming) on one of the wings, that was sorted with some green putty and a respray.




Then onto masking the wheel wells and myriad panels/antennas, not chancing any overspray!


Result:







This is how I masked the round antennae on the dorsal side




Result:


I've got a bit of touch-up to do and some more panels that need sprayed but I'm nearly done with the painting. Time is fast approaching to deal with the decal/mask issue, I still need to get the better scanner...or just bite the bullet and see how bad these really look first....

Thanks for looking!

The last pieces for the project arrived in the last week or so...

1) Scanner to hopefully get better masks off the Silhouette, I had scanned the sheet at work on the fax machine but the resolution was too low and I was getting rounded off letters...here is the scan I will be using:


2) The crew figures from Hasegawa. I was going to do the Verlinden ones but with the scanner expenditure I cheaped out a bit...


3) The carrier base. I have seen this product from Uschi in several photos on the 'net but never found an honest review...maybe I've seen Untergang too many times but this little girl looks just like the hitlerjugend manning the flac and really creeps me out!


I knew it was just a printed image but I assumed (hoped?) it was printed on some sort of card stock. WRONG! it is spread accross 3 pages that need to be cut out. 3 problems with this:
-they are not straight cuts, angles and jogs need to be carefully cut out and need to match PERFECTLY for this not to look crap
-you are left with a non standard sized image that you will need to make a base for
-they are printed on thick photo paper, which is ok because the image is very well done and very realistic...however...the paper does not cut well at all, the middle between the photo coating tends to ball up and rip irregardless of the sharpness of the blade used. I tried everything from brand new scalpel blades, xacto blades, my wife's rotary cutter made for this material. I always ended up with a white edge where the cut was made. I made a bit of a dog's breakfast out of it.


This is obviously not glued down yet and would look better when that is done, but no matter what I do I will end up with the white lines that I will either need to blend with pigments or ink the edges or something...so instead of all that I'm going to try scanning them all and stitching them together in Photoshop then digitally remove the seams then print it off as a whole sheet somewhere (cant' do it at home because it is 11x17"). All in all, not impressed...especially considering the $15 price...if you are thinking of using one of their bases i would implore you to not do it. This is really going to be fun...

Last night I took stock of where I am and got back at it, I am deciding on which figures to use from the set, getting the deck tractor sorted, found a place to print the deck.

I spent a lot of time messing with the stencils in the downtime. They turned out pretty well but due to limitations of the machine it cannot print things too small or narrow which leaves out most of the small decals, I could have sprayed the ones I could make stencils for and use decals for the others but I was worried that they would look too different since I would have to try and match the black color from the decal sheet. So I am going to press on with the kit decals, but I will be removing as much of the excess carrier film before application...if it doesn't work I will rip em off and go to plan B. Speaking with Freedom about this via email they dropped a hint that there is a company working on aftermarket decals for this kit but there is no set release date.

I painted up the tires after (trying) to fill all the bubbles in the 2 bad ones and glued 'em on after installing the main gear and letting it set overnight.




I also installed all the antennae, 13 or 14 between top an bottom. Here you can see one of the kit decals, this was all one decal with film in the empty spaces, I removed all of that fearing biblical silvering if I hadn't.


Then the decals on the top side of the wings. The decals are not bad to work with considering they are thicker than even the worst Tamiya decals I have ever seen...I needed to bust out the Solvaset though, they laugh at Micosol and Mr Softer/Setter both. These were from the second set that had the strange creases in them, it looks like the setting solution is flattening them out.

Really interesting
I know nothing about this aircraft, but the skill you are applying to the scale model of it is VERY interesting
...and that must be the ugliest hammer I have ever seen, makes me want to hit it with another hammer

what a skills!!!! great work man!

Scott, don't be hating on my sweet fookin' hammer lol...it's what I get for asking my wife to pick it up for me.

Thanks for the complement guys! this kit requires some extra work but it pays off.

Today I pressed on with the decals, all done now and letting them set before cleaning up the water spots and sealing them in. After a close look at both the original and replacement decal sets I opted to go for the replacement even though they all had odd wavy damage to them from being placed in their plastic bag with no paper on top to protect them...the decals were in contact with the bag and caused this:


Luckily the setting solutions flattened them out nicely, if you look very closely you can see some artifact of the damage caught in the flash but it's invisible otherwise. I spent a lot of time on this one since the wings will be in the stowed configuration the one on the top of the other wing will not really be visible. I honestly lost track of how many applications of solvaset this took.


The walkways were an absolute chore, 5 decals on one side 6 on the other and the hexagon up front was especially fun since I got rid of the seams and lines they used to reference their placement...that one is made of 4 decals.



A couple more things to point out....
err, derp?


They reacted well to the solutions and laid down well with very little silvering as you can see


I did, however take out some insurance by removing the large sections of excess clear film from the following decals, otherwise I'm positive they would have silvered badly or just looked crap. I toyed with the idea of removing the film from around the others as well but the return on that time investment would have been rather minimal compared to the big ones...


but they are glossy and their finish is not uniform, as you can kind of see, this makes them look silvered when they are not...not too bad and the gloss/matte coats may tone this down.


While I was in the decaling mood I dealt with the deck tractor also, I included a teaser shot to show the result of the modifications I needed to make to make the front gear fit inside the forks.






Thanks for looking!

Oh that is hilarious "be were" but they screwed up "no sterp"
I will hastily halt my hammer hating; have it highly hinged to avoid hoity-ness
Nice build BTW

Thanks!

I got the wash done and did the wear effect to the ailerons


As you can see, they wear pretty distinctly from moving up and down...



my attempt with oils:

Well, finished up the aircraft today...the gear doors were a real chore and should have been done before I installed the gear. I wanted to really be careful with the familiar red trim on USN aircraft doors, tedious masking and lots of touchups paid off I think.






The airbrakes drop when stowed and powered down due to lack of hydraulic pressure, so those were glued in place






The wings were a tighter fit than they were at the dryfit stage, maybe layers of paint? but I didn't really spray those areas... It was touch and go but they are in, aligned and just needing a bit of weathering on the mechanisms. The kit detail is very nice, especially the PE wiring loom, and part of the reason I wanted to spend the extra time and display it this way.





Then the flat coat, I opted for a lacquer matte for a change, the acrylic one I usually use tends to be tricky to get thinned well so that it does not spit and it is a real chore to clean out the AB after application.

with the self leveling thinner this stuff really laid down nicely, but I am very happy that my booth is vented outside!!

This is the most rewarding stage for me, it pulls all the layers together so much, even the decals almost look painted on.





I got the deck tractor weathered up also



The 12x18 print of my "fixed" base should arrive tomorrow and I have started on the figures...stay tuned.

thanks for looking!

As expected, the photographically printed deck base arrived today. I have used this company before and knew they do good work, but there was still some anxiety about the result. It came out very nicely


As it comes from Uschi it is an odd size that would not fit any standard frame. I wanted to match it to a standard frame size, so while I was fixing the seams in Photoshop I resized it a bit to 12x18 keeping it in roughly the same aspect ratio. If I had to do this again I would not have gone with this product, with the need to have it printed this ended up costing way too much, but it looks great and I have it for future use now too...I really can't emphasize how disappointing this base was at first, Uschi would be better off just selling the digital file.

Test shot:



There is quite a bit of open space since the plane is relatively small, I am going to build the other deck tractor that came in the kit to fill some space. The figures, little details and I can wrap this up!!!

Thanks for looking!

Just got it wrapped up!


What can I say about the kit?...
She was a challenge to put it lightly...not something to be attempted by anyone with less than say...10 competed projects under their belt (depending on how quickly they learn) the decals and intake alone would scare off many people. But for a first release from a new manufacturer I am impressed!
I caused myself a lot of the extra work by closing up the bomb bay and gear doors, taking out the intake seam, removing the excess deal film, smoothing off the nose and modeling with the wings up...but IMO these things needed to be done to not only get the most out of the kit but show off some of the coolest features of this unique aircraft. I hope you think it was worth it as well!

Kit: Freedom Models FD18001, aftermarket wheels from Must Have Models and base from Uschi van der Rosten (neither one recommended), Skunkmodels USN tractor, digitally enhanced photo base printed by Mpix
Paints used: Stynylrez primer, Model Master Acryl, Tamiya Acrylic

This is the best shot I could get of the intake, also good shot of the nosejob.

This is the "money shot" as far as I'm concerned...frankly I'm amazed I pulled this off!


Surface detail is amazing, and the decals will behave if you remove the excess film and beat them with a big enough stick (Solvaset).




HMMMM...flash didn't fire?

Great job so far, some brill modelling skills on show.

One of the great things about this forum is seeing new stuff tried out, I was thinking about getting the decking for my Pacific war GB but seeing what it's like has put me right off.

Looks amazing!!!
I am loving the images with the base a tractor, it really sets off the model
You have made the aircraft so lifelike, it deserves such a cool mini diorama
Job well done

Fantastic build of a very interesting subject

I agree with the comments on the bases as i too have been in the very same situation !

Thank you i really enjoyed this build

Cheers

What's that tool you used to punch those circular masks in the tape? I've been looking for something better than a blade and plastic stencil. Anyone know? Does it come with a wide variety of punch diameters?

Very nice build. Great to watch !

This is an old thread but boy was it worth being back up
The work put it is superb really enjoyed going threw the pics as I have had my eye on this kit ever since umpretail had it in there online shop.
With some modelling skills it can be brought too life. You done a fine job on the paint work as well. It does not look like a grey slab
Well done Tim