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Had to cross the hall to the 2-D "studio" for the past couple days. Meet Mitzi in progress. She needs to be delivered by Christmas. Shouldn't be a problem. Capturing her fur texture is a little like masking the canopies of a dozen Ju.88s. What a bitch. (A description that seems particularly apt here.)
8 X 9, colored pencil on Stonehenge paper.
Finally got the Gripen to a stage to show with its Viggen pal.
Italeri kit found in a Tamiya box. It didn't exactly snap together. Very good thing I didn't want the canopy both closed and clear. It gets bad marks for fit there.
Looks to me like the kind of airplane Darth Vader would fly.
Got a number of 1/72nd jet fighters going at the moment that all feature one of those troublesome spears stickin' out the front end. Took some time to do them all at once as they all essentially require the same procedure.
I drill out the tip of the nosecone to accommodate a very small diameter aluminum tube. I insert a short length of this soft metal tube and blend the front end (with superglue, file and sandpaper) to match the lines of the nosecone. This gives a very positive mount for the styrene rod that will eventually be the pitot tube. This is a handy thing because I rarely ship a model with pitot tube attached. If it arrives snapped off at the other end of the journey...well it's a tough fix for someone who in most cases is not a modeler. On the other hand, most buyers don't have much trouble inserting the tube into a small hole in the front of the model.
The bitch about most pitot tubes is the stepped nature of the forward end of them. I've got hypo needle stock, hollow with a perfectly centered hole down the middle, but I rarely use it. (It just looks like a hypo needle sticking out of a model to me, and styrene is easier to work with.) I put on my highest power vision enhancement, center a pilot hole in the tip of the styrene rod, then oh-so-carefully drill out that hole with a very fine drill bit. Into that hole I superglue a short bit of stretched sprue and trim it to the correct length. I find it a bit less daunting if I can production-line them as in this case.
Interestingly (thankfully), the Viggen doesn't have much of a step in the tip of its pitot tube, if any. On that one I only had to sand a taper on to the front end. Much easier that the standard two-piece tube.
Now I remove those spears and put them in a safe and remembered place until the model is finished.
Some of my modeling pals made a rare visit to my place today. One of them, one G. Brian James of Techumseh, Ontario, brought these. All 1/72.
Brian and I followed parallel courses for many years concerning putting model airplanes on stands. His approach is slightly different than my own, but as can be seen, his works beautifully. Well done, Mr. James. Come back with new stuff anytime.
