A very small project: Academy 1/144 Sepecat Jaguar

[yak face]

Looking great now marcos, im tempted to find one of these myself. Which colour scheme are you going to do it in? , cheers tony

[Guest]

Hi tony!

I am thinking of doing it Desert Storm all the way, a pink Jag (The Guardian reader) including over wing pylons. Here is the babe:

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I already got the paint, thanks to your tip on the right colour. Right now I am just adding a few little bits to it and after masking the canopy I am ready for the painting. Progress!

cheers!

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[yak face]

Excellent! i love the desert storm camo , cheers tony

[Guest]

A little more progress here. Added the underwing pylons and scratchbuilt the overwing pylons. I hope it doesn't look too out of scale.

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A piece of plastic was inserted into the air intake to make it look more like the real thing.

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And the canopy was masked with electrical tape. I've heard of that once and decided to give it a try. It really is easy to work with it. It conforms to curves, stretches and bends where necessary and gives a nice clean cut. I hope it will come out ok in the end.

Next thing I "borrowed" one of the drop tanks from an F-16 kit that was sitting on the stash watching the whole thing and adapted it to look like a Jag one. That nice little F-16 also donated a couple of sidewinders because they look really good and in scale. The ones provided with the kit are not good looking and deserve to be put aside. Tony, if you are looking into building this one in the future you will know what I'm talking about. I suggest you go get that F-16 for the weapons and also build it afterwards, it's quite nice.

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Then the model went happily to get a light dust of paint. Yay! And it was literally "dust". I got some orange peel effect on the thing. I got so excited about my progress that I didn't pay attention the "right amount pressure X thinning the paint right = good finish" equation. Oh bother.

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that had happened before on another occasion, a couple of weeks ago. I just tossed the model in the bin. But this time I just waited another day, went back to the model and with a brush tried to remove the "dust". It worked. the paint had such a bad adhesion to the plastic that almost everything came off. I then got creative and pulled my electric toothbrush out of the hat and let it have a go at it. It worked even better. Now it is officially part of my odd modelling tools inventory.

Having learned my lesson twice I will most likely post a success story next time. Cheers!

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[Guest]

There's a pink aircraft at the Yorkshire Air Museum but I can't remember what it is. I'll have to have a dig through my pictures and see if I can find the shots I took of it. Certainly an interesting colour scheme.

This is coming aloing beautifully and still amazes me at the amount of detail crammed into such a small kit. You're certainly making the most of it.

[Guest]

Here you go, it was a Buccaneer:

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[Guest]

They all participated in the Gulf War with great significance. I love the looks of the Buccaneer, saw it once at the air force museum in Pretoria, South Africa. quite a powerful looking aircraft.

[Guest]

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To the relief of many of you that might have got bored of watching this slow development, I declare that this build is finally coming to an end. Here the steps following the last post:

After a couple of coats of the base coat I painted the wheel bays and airbrake hatches zinc chromate (my own mix), the blast shield (is that how you call it?) and exhaust cans Humbrol Silver and Flat Black. Next time I will paint those details first then apply the main colour, it was a hassle to mask those tiny little areas. By the way my airbrushing is leaving much to desire right now, see how rough the finish is? Darn, I do need to climb that ever so steep learning curve! After that some coats of the local version of Klear (Johnson's Cobra) and I applied the decals. Sad to say, Academy lives up to its reputation when it comes to decals. Applying them wasn't hard but it was almost impossible to make them settle. Several (meaning a whole lot) coats of Tamiya Mark Fit didn't do the job and here they go, looking like stickers. Oh bother.

In the meantime I prepared and painted all the sub assemblies (I'm trying to learn those technical terms).

I know the Jaguars during the Gulf War took some pounding and showed themselves very weathered, so I decided to apply some washes, very subtle, to highlight some panel lines and that was all the weathering I could think of. Just a little weathering goes a long way in this little scale.

After gluing the ordnances (another cool term) and other thingamajigs (here we go again) I applied a good coat of Humbrol Dullcote. You might have noticed that the decals for the roundels are in the wrong colour. Since there is no alternative to the kit decals I thought I could solve the problem by “bleaching” the decals with a mix of Dullcote and flat White but that didn't work. It looked like it had an accident involving a bag of flour and I gave up in a cloud of swearing.

All done, in spite of all the goof-offs I was moderately happy with the results. I will post it under the Completed Models section after I find and glue back the pitot tube that after being knocked off and reglued about 55 times got swallowed up by the small bits black hole that lives under my desk. So here it is, bad pictures and all. Rotten tomatoes are accepted but not too rotten please, after all this is my second model ever completed. My special thanks to Tony, Richard, Penny, Andy and Ian M for hints, tips and general moral support. Thanks guys!

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[yak face]

Hi marcos , great job,well done!You would never be able to tell how small it is until you see the pic on your hand, it looks at least 1/72. Shame about the lost pitot tube , if you want to replace it a toothbrush bristle is about the right size , ive used them before and theyre ok, plus theyre quite springy so will sometimes survive an accidental knock. Top marks on a great build and excellent tiny scratchbuilding skills! cheers tony

[Guest]

Thanks Tony! Great tip on the pitot tube,thank you I am surely going for that. I am happy I got to bring this one to the finish line, I've been building this for a good while already. I enjoyed working with this scale in particular. So much so that I have a whole stash of 1/144 jets waiting for me! Cheers!

[Ian M]

Thats a great little aircraft you have built there Marcos. I agree with Tony in that you would not guess it was braile scale. I did a 1/144 me 262 a while back and it did my head in!!!

Well done!

Ian M