Tamiya 1/48 A 10A Thunderbolt

[Guest]

Maybe I should wait until you've practised building yours then pop over with mine. Should be a doddle in the larger size :smiling2:

[wotan]

Andy

I did a fairly messy oil wash over the whole thing and then wiped most of it off, going in the direction of the airflow. I made the same PE it is not too fiddly.

John

[Guest]

A bit more progress today, mainly working on the poppy and bangy things.

Here's just one set



And after a lot of gluing and sanding, they received a splash of paint. According to the instructions they should be XF-62 Olive Drab. Because I'm limited on colours I made something similar from US Camo Green and Model Air basic yellow. It's hard to tell from the picture but I varied the shade a bit by adding more yellow so they weren't all exactly the same. There's still a lot of detail painting to do on these, but variety is the spice of life. There are more to do but they are gloss white, so they'll have to wait until I have some of that.



Then made a start on the GAU-8, which is pretty much what this bird is all about so I wanted it to look nice, which is why I opted for the PE. I'm sorry for the shocking photo but even this shows how much of an improvement it is over the standard kit lump of plastic.



It wasn't as hard to put together as I'd feared. I did several dry runs to work out which way was best to make sure the 11 separate parts lined up correctly, then went for it. The thin CA glue I just bought really helped a lot here as I could simply fit a part in place and let capillary action do the rest. Could do with finding something better than a sharpened lolly stick to apply it, but if it works, it works :smiling2:

I then chopped the barrel section off the kit part and started modifying what was left to fit the PE



Temporarily in place on the nose



Then blended the kit part into the nose. I've started trying to pay more attention to reference pictures in order to get things looking more like the real thing. I know it won't always be possible with my limited skills and resources but I'm trying where I can.

[Fernando N]

Looking good on the paint work Andy. :thumb2:

Pretty neat to have built a PE gun too, will definitely improve the look of the Hog when finished.

[Guest]

Thanks Fernando.

Really struggled getting decent pictures today though, maybe too much beer at a friends wedding bash last night!

[rtfoe]

Good PE work Andy. Just a suggestion on cutting plastic parts to join to PE is to cut further up and leave just enough plastic to whittle away with sanding. This would result in a neat square cut.

Cheers,
Richard

[Guest]

Thanks for the tip Richard. The fit doesn't look too great in that work in progress shot but I forgot to take a finished one.

I was trying to emulate the real thing where the barrel slips inside of a housing that is cut at a slight angle.



Wasn't sure how to recreate the seam though.

[Guest]

According to the instructions they should be XF-62 Olive Drab. Because I'm limited on colours I made something similar from US Camo Green and Model Air basic yellow.

Olive drab is (was originally?) made from black plus ochre pigments, so you may be able to mix a reasonable match from some black and medium brown paints.

There are more to do but they are gloss white, so they'll have to wait until I have some of that.

White primer plus gloss varnish would probably be my choice, given how dark the plastic is.

Then made a start on the GAU-8, which is pretty much what this bird is all about so I wanted it to look nice, which is why I opted for the PE. I'm sorry for the shocking photo but even this shows how much of an improvement it is over the standard kit lump of plastic.

That is looking very well, and certainly a big improvement on the kit parts.

Could do with finding something better than a sharpened lolly stick to apply it

I’m not really sure you can I use cocktail sticks, that I re-sharpen when glue builds up on the tip, and they work fine.

Wasn't sure how to recreate the seam though.

That looks like a flange for bolting the upper and lower sections together. A bit of plastic strip would do the trick, but you’d need to buy some first.

An alternative way using materials that you do have, is to find a bit of square-profile sprue (make this yourself if necessary: shave it with a knife or use a metal file) and stretch it over a candle flame. To do this, hold the sprue a little way above the flame and keep rotating it between your fingers so it heats up evenly. When it goes soft, remove it from above the flame and pull your hands apart to stretch the sprue out to a thinner diameter (it may take a few tries to get the technique right but you have plenty of material to practice with ). The thing here is that the material will keep the profile it had, so stretching square sprue gives a square plastic rod, just much thinner.

[Guest]

Cheers Jakko. I did contemplate primer & varnish. I have both so it might be a good shout and save me buying another product just yet.

I'm trying not to buy into one brand of paint too heavily until I settle on one I really like. Vallejo Model Air wins on the health & safety front until I have a spray booth, but I know from my experience at work how fragile water borne acrylics can be until they've had a lot of drying time or a good dose of heat.

The Mr Color primers I've tried were great, and a quick practice with the colours makes me think they'll suit me better than VMA, but obviously there's the solvents to worry about.

Mr Paint sounds like another brand that I'd like, but again it's solvent based and I don't think they're brushable from the bottle so I'd need two ranges of paint.

I'm sure eventually I'll build up a big stock of different paints but as I'm still just starting out really I don't want to be buying everything at once and end up with a ton of stuff that I don't use.

And thanks for the tip. I've seen plenty of mentions of stretched sprue. Now I know what they are talking about! :smiling5:

[Guest]

Cheers Jakko. I did contemplate primer & varnish. I have both so it might be a good shout and save me buying another product just yet.

One thing I just thought of is that you’d want to try the primer on a bit of sprue from this kit first. Years ago, I was building this M113 TUA (TOW Under Armour):

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The basis is a Tamiya M113 kit, moulded in dark green plastic like your A-10. Here’s the finish I wanted it to have:

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That is, UN peacekeeper white (these vehicles were used like this in Bosnia). I sprayed white primer from a spraying can, intended for use on cars, onto the model, but the colour of the plastic seeped into the primer and turned it very pale green. This was definitely a problem with the Tamiya plastic, because other parts (like the black plastic of a set of aftermarket single-link tracks I fitted) didn’t discolour at all. It took four or five coats of primer for it to be white instead of ever-paler green.

What I’m trying to say is that attempting to paint your bombs or missiles might result in similar effects. Perhaps going for a grey primer first might help?

And thanks for the tip. I've seen plenty of mentions of stretched sprue. Now I know what they are talking about! :smiling5:

The instructions for tank kits often describe how to make it, because they tell you to use it for antennas, but aircraft kit instructions are less likely to

[Guest]

Yes, I have a similar problem in my day job. The hiding power (how it blots out the underlying colour) of whites is well below that of most other colours and worse still, it can look great when applied but not after full curing. I have a trick up my sleeve for full size stuff where I add around 10% of a very fine silver to my first coat of white. The fine aluminium flakes settle down and blot out the substrate, almost like laying a sheet of foil over it. I have seen one YouTube modeller spraying a layer of silver over his primer if the plastic has a very different colour to his top coat, which will have a very similar effect.

Mr Color actually produce a product with this problem in mind - Mr Base White, which has a much higher pigment content than their regular surfacers in an effort to help the covering power of light top coats over dark plastics.

Having said that, I primed up some parts tonight in their Mr Finishing surfacer and 3 light coats don't look too bad. I will see how they look after curing overnight but they may well be "white" enough to simply gloss over as we discussed. Since most of the plane is dark I think the contrast will be more than enough though, even if they have a bit of a green tinge.

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Believe it or not they are all the same colour. Funny how lighting and cameras affect things.

Also did some detail painting on one of the bombs. The colour scheme is a bit strange to say the least! Again I didn't have any of the right colour (gold) so made some up with silver, yellow & red.

Excuse the dodgy brush painting :smiling4:

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[Guest]

Yes, I have a similar problem in my day job. The hiding power (how it blots out the underlying colour) of whites is well below that of most other colours

Sorry, I don’t think I explained well enough. What I was talking about is the colour of the plastic actually leaching into the primer, not just being visible through it. The black plastic of the track links was nice and white after one or two coats, but the green of the hull was still very pale green at that point. Looking closely at the paint it was clear that it had actually turned green a little.

I have seen one YouTube modeller spraying a layer of silver over his primer if the plastic has a very different colour to his top coat, which will have a very similar effect.

That sounds like a trick to keep in mind.

Also did some detail painting on one of the bombs. The colour scheme is a bit strange to say the least! Again I didn't have any of the right colour (gold) so made some up with silver, yellow & red.

The fins are supposed to be brass, right? You could have fooled me that you didn’t get the paint from a bottle

[Guest]

What I was talking about is the colour of the plastic actually leaching into the primer, not just being visible through it.

Oh crumbs, hope that doesn't happen to mine!

The fins are supposed to be brass, right? You could have fooled me that you didn’t get the paint from a bottle :smiling3:

Yes, something like that. I've actually seen a few different colour schemes on Google images but decided to go with the box art version. And mixing colours is thankfully something that comes quite easily after all these years. Whilst most of it is computer aided these days I still often have to do a few subtle tweaks by eye to match a car that's been previously repaired, or badly weathered.

[stillp]

An old house-painter's trick to help cover strongly-grained timber, or colours that tend to leach, is to use aluminium paint as a primer - Rustin's sell an aluminium primer for wood. I'd never have thought of using it on a 1:1 spray job though.
Pete

[Guest]

First colour on. Sorely tempted to mask up and get cracking on with the others straight away but will try and be patient!

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