Airfix 1:72 Harrier GR9

[Ed Sunder]

I decided to mask the top of the wing and hand paint the bottom (who looks at the bottom?) and completely mask off the tail. The weapons pylons made masking the bottom more time consuming than I would like... Note - if you build this model, paint the wing edges before painting the wings and then mask them off for the rest of the painting - it'll be much easier.



In about an hour I'm going to clear-coat it. Between clear coating the bottom and then the top and waiting for things to dry, it'll be tomorrow at soonest before I'm back on this thing.

[Mini Me]

Getting closer. :thumb2:

[Mickc1440]

Really nice looking model

[JR]

Some fine work Ed.

[Tim Marlow]

Lovely work going on here.

[adt70hk]

Great work!!

Very well done!!

Andrew

[Ed Sunder]

I've started attaching the gear, gear doors etc. and I've found that the main gear is about 0.5mm or so off the deck, with the other gear attached. It's possible I don't have the wing gear down far enough, but I think it's correct. Anyway, that ship has sailed. So I need to push the gear a bit lower. So I made a little shim out of styrene. Here is that shim, along with the gear:


And here is the hole where it'll go:


And here it is glued in place:


Once that dries I'll paint it and put the gear in, along with the rest of the doors. Incidentally, I'm not sure what it is about my phone camera, but I promise you the finish doesn't look like that. It's quite smooth. Of course, these are magnified a ton... Anyway, that's about as far as I'm likely to get today.

I started this build as a, "Hey I'm going to try to build something in a week to get my model mojo back!" project, but then when I got into it I liked where it was going and tried to make it a lot better. As a result I wasn't super concerned with seams and such initially. You can see the area around the lower flap door has some sort of dent where the flap attaches. If I were to build another one of these, there are a lot of things I'd do differently. Ah well...

[Guest]

Incidentally, I'm not sure what it is about my phone camera, but I promise you the finish doesn't look like that. It's quite smooth.

Cameras are too good these days … Photograph anything up close and it’ll look a lot worse than it does in real life

[Tim Marlow]

Cameras are too good these days … Photograph anything up close and it’ll look a lot worse than it does in real life :smiling3:

Some of it is the photo enhancement algorithm the camera applies post shot as well. They “sharpen” the image, which can make flaws much more noticeable, and they saturate colours, which can make the different coloured areas stand out from each other…..

[Ed Sunder]

Some of it is the photo enhancement algorithm the camera applies post shot as well.

I have a Pixel 4 phone, which does a lot of enhancement. Normally, that's fantastic, but for these purposes, maybe not as much.

[Ed Sunder]

Well, things are coming along, but I've gotten to the point where I'm working on the clear bits and there's an issue. The sliding part of the canopy clear part has sprue gates that attached to the window in such a way that it would make part of the clear window stick out proud about a millimeter of the main window. I think that plastic got out of the extrusion - it didn't look like it was meant to be there. So I sanded it down as best I could, although I lost a bit of the lower window detail (which I should be able to replace with some putty), but there's just no way to easily remove it. I already got rid of the seam down the middle of the canopy, which I'd never seen on such a small model - I've had it on 1:48 f-16's - but which wasn't too much trouble. But I've sanded and polished and sanded and polished and there's just no way to get this to really blend. Here's what it looks like now:


You can see it in the corner - it looks like a chip out of the plastic (and on the bottom, it is sanded out a bit - like I said I can fix that part with putty or something) but the other part is standing proud in such a way that I just can't get it smooth. Part of the issue is that the canopy shape is a curve and so as I sand, it's difficult to only sand that part and not things around it and also to match the shape. I'm not sure I have a good solution. It isn't absolutely terrible, but I just hate stuff like that...

Update: I used a metal file to go at it more precisely, it took a while to get the scratches out, but it actually worked decently. My only real issue now is that the pressure I was putting on it seems to have created an internal very faint crack on the back - it's only visible at certain angles and is pretty small. It perfectly aligns with the seam I had to remove. I am hoping that once the ejection cord decals are on, it'll be close to invisible. Photos will come later...

[Ed Sunder]

After doing detail brush painting in a number of areas and gloss-coating the whole thing a couple days ago, I've spent this evening decaling:


They really break up the scheme and I'm quite happy with how they've turned out. After cleaning up any debris, I'll put another coat of future on to seal them in and then dull coat as appropriate. One thing that I realized isn't in the instructions nor is it molded on the model are the wing lights:


So I painted some on, which I think look decent.



So here's where I'm at now:


It's getting close! I need to add the clear parts on (after finishing needed work on them), add the weapons, clear-coat and then dull coat the model and I'll be done. I actually have two more decals that need to go on, but they are in a spot that I often use to hold the model so I'll be leaving them off until just before the clear-coat.

It's been a fun little kit and if I were to do it again, I'd be able to save myself a bunch of time and headache. I sometimes feel like I should just buy two of every kit so that I can use the first one to figure out how to really do the second one right.

[Ed Sunder]

After a lot of work on the canopy shape - sanding and polishing etc to fix the bad shot of the clear part - I felt good enough about it to go ahead and assemble this section of the model. I started by painting the rear part, adding some details based on my reference materials. I then wanted to add the iconic det cord found on the canopy. In this model, it comes as a two part decal, but I decided to instead create a vinyl part instead on my vinyl cutter. I think it looks really good and doesn't have any of the potential negatives of the decal. It's slightly over scale, though it's no further off than the decal, and would be hard to make much thinner as it's about a quarter of a mm wide. After masking and painting the clear part I added the det cord and used clear glue to attach the parts together. I also painted the windscreen, but I don't have a photo of that. Here's how it turned out (along with the vinyl from which I cut it out):



I'll need to do some detail painting on the grille at the back and some paint/dull coat on where the glue is a bit shiny at the joint between the parts. I'm also considering scratch building some mirrors for around the canopy edge - I think they would add some nice detail.

[Mickc1440]

That's great work, I had to scroll back to check I'd actually read 1/72

[yak face]

Its all looking superb Ed , the problems with the canopy arent noticeable at all now . Great idea with the vinyl cutter for the canopy cord , that must be a really useful tool to have , making your own masks , for canopies etc . Cheers tony