Progress shots

The wheel well walls are multi-piece affairs. Some care has to be taken when gluing the parts but they fit nice and are adorned by some really nice details.

Exhaust cans are deep and even feature turbine blades which will never be seen again in the depths behind the afterburner flameholders.

I painted them with Alclad Exhaust Manifold, giving it a nice brownish burnt metal appearance and I also airbrushed a few grey streaks as often seen in the burner cans. I will probably lay down a wash as well, but haven’t decided yet as I am not sure how much will be seen of them after I install the exhaust nozzles.

A little dry fit of the lower fuselage moulded together with wing inserts and the wing halves themselves. I was having a bit of a hard time here – I had to sand the inner sides of the wing inserts first to improve the fit. This helped erradicate the leading edge seams. However, I don’t understand the engineering logic behind the rear seam – running diagonally across the flaperons and not following any existing panel line. And the worst being that I couldn’t make it go away by sanding the wing halves alone…

In the end, I’ve decided for an easier route – looking at reference photos, I noticed that its flaperons dropped, while the aircraft was parked – bring out the CMK saw and scribers and I simply cut the flaperons away. Dealing with that nasty seam is now much easier and without any fear, those fine details on the bottom of the surface will be sanded away.

Burner cans are made of two pieces – exterior details is a little faint but so is on a real aircraft. Some careful painting should brighten them up. The only problem is that the burner cans had 6 attachment points and one molding defect on the inner rim.

The tail is two-piece affair… nothing special – some seam cleanup required at the top and I’ve added a piece of styrene to strengthen the join with the main fuselage.

Wings attached nicely to the fuselage and only a little clean up was required. Same goes for the splitter plates and shock cones.

Cockpit is made of combination of plastic parts, photo etched parts and decals.

Martin Baker Mk.10 seat looks really great out of the box.

A major problem that I stumbled upon – if you wanna build the closed canopy, the instrument bay cover, that’s attached to the canopy (similar arrangement as F-15) will get into conflict with the “shelf” just behind the ejection seat. I had to cut that shelf in half and remove the whole avionics bay to get the canopy closed. Of course, if doing the open canopy, you wouldn’t have such problems.

And TA-DAAAA – we have the rough shape of the aircraft. Of course, a lot of things still to be done on the model but stay tuned for more!

important step in this build – primed with Mig’s Ammo One Shot Primer. Just a few touch ups to be done and she’ll get a coat of white tomorrow evening

The kit supplied masks for the Red and Black were of a lot of help. However the masks for the transition from the intakes to the canards weren’t as good and had to be replaced with Tamiya Masking tape.

Decalling is done!

First was the wash – I was afraid that it would be too dark for the white scheme, but I am quite satisfied how it turned out in the end. Mixed it with combination of Payne’s Grey and Titanium White oil colours and ended up looking a bit like Lt Ghost Grey.

A bunch of PE antenna were also added as well as landing gear.