X-45A UCAV

Bomb rack assembled, just need to add the final fine details.

X-45A UCAV

Bombing up the real thing

 Engine inlet and outlet faces complete 

 Weapons bay assembled

 

X-45A UCAV

Front and back of the engine complete and unpainted.

 First spray of primer and the gaps between the blades look a little inconsistent.

 After filling with Milliput Super Fine almost complete, need a little more filling. 

 Weapons bay under construction. The walls of the bay are from 1mm styrene and the raised milled sections from 0.5 x 0.5 square styrene. There is plenty more detail to add here.

X-45A UCAV

Originally the wings were to be formed separately but I figure the best way to get a good match will be to shape them along with the fuselage. Due to the thinness of the wings I will shape these from balsa over a styrene profile.

 

The X-45 was powered by a Honeywell F124-GA-100 turbofan. The engine is tightly cowled and difficult to see in photos however the front and rear will be visible so I have begun fabricating these.

 In this picture only 3 of the first stage fan blades have been fitted and the nose cone is glued in position ... many more to add.

1/35 Guntruck Factory Iraq

 The diorama will have a portion of a shipping container filling a corner. The container was made from scratch in styrene from diagrams found on the net.

 At this point i have the base colours applied. This started with a preshade in matt black over a undercoat of Tamiya primer. This was also applied inside.

 Following the preshading I applied a patchy coat of Tamiya XF-19. This was lightened a little before lightening the roof as well as using a colour modulaton style on the raised elements of both the container and doors. This will be further enhanced later by brush painting with Vallejo colours.

 As art of the initial painting I also applied the Maersk logo that i created from images on the net.

Next step will be to heavily weather the container and doors.

Huey Bushranger Gunship 1/35

The shape of the windows in the Panda / Dragon kit is good and they fit well but they are incredibly thick and to use them seemed a waste of all that interior detail, so I decided to vac form new ones. I want to make each one as thin as possible so rather than make them fit into the openings I will make them fit over. This also simulates the raised plates with double rows of rivets around each opening. Once formed and glued in position I can add yet more Archer rivets around their perimeter. Luckily the kit incorporates rivet lines into the airframe around each window and you will see from previous posts and the image below I have sanded everything back level with the airframe. For the windscreen I've added a lower mounting flange as well as the central vertical frame.

All the side windows were made from clear acetate cut to shape and glued into position with Gator Glue. The sliding window in the doors was depicted in the open position.

To create the vac form patterns Ive added flanges around each of the original clear parts as well as reinforcing the edges with sheet styrene.

In addition I pored plaster into the openings to make sure there was no chance of collapse when the pressure is on.

Here is the small vacuum former, it takes a 24cm x 15cm sheet ... perfect for small parts.

 

1/35 Guntruck Factory Iraq

All the parts of the star of the show, the Humvee under construction. This is an older photo and I've already shown some of the items painted. Wheels are resin items from Voyager.  

The frame and suspension is as Tamiya made it, the only thing I've added is a few bolt heads to the bull bar brackets.

 In this view you can see the fill in panels added to the load bed, the scratch built roll hoop as well as a series of small brackets.

 The radio brackets were remade and the aerial bracket was from a Voyager Humvee Electronic Antennas photo etch set.

 Difficult to reach areas have already been painted matt black while they can still be reached, most of this will be covered by the interior colour once painted.

Creating the canvas roof folded back had me scratching my head for a bit. In the end I made the internal frame pieces from piano wire tacked in place with super glue. I then rolled out some Milliput very thinly and made the first layer running from windscreen to roll hoop. Once this had hardened the entire assembly could be removed and worked on separately from the body work.

  Once the first layer had hardened I made the folded back portion laying it back over the first.

 I finally added some of the detail flaps and rivet holes and puttied a couple of slight imperfections.