The FAA go American

[Weaver]

But my impression is that there were no Essex class carriers "spare" once the Korean war had started: all the ones that were in reserve seem to have been quickly re-commissioned and put into service. The only exceptions seem to have been the two unfinished ones (how finished were they? were they still hanging around in 1950?) and two that were so badly damaged in WWII that they never recomissioned post-war. The question with the latter two wolud be whether the damage was so bad that they were physically not worth re-building or whether it was just that the USN had so many others that it wasn't worth it for them (but might have been for the RN?).

An Essex was more the size of an Illustrious than a Colossus, so it would be more suitable as a replacement for the former than the latter. Indeed the latter would complement it quite well (as they were designed to do, of course).

BTW, the Aussies were offered an Essex in, I think, the early 1970s, and rejected it for the same reason as the RN did, namely that re-fitting it to work with their mostly UK-built fleet would take too long and cost too much, so maybe there was some substance in the RN's objections after all.....

[Weaver]

Decals arrived today: I went for the Xtradecal 13 x Sea Hawks one in the end. They'll certainly cover a Panther and a Cougar and a little jiggery pokery with serial numbers should make them stretch to a Tiger.

The vac-form canopy set from Falcon arrived too - gulp.....

Looking around Falcon's website, I noticed that they do a conversion set for three two-seaters: a TF-9J Cougar, an F-106B and a Mirage IIIT. It strikes me that the TF-9J conversion should also fit on a Panther, thus making a highly credible whiff. There's also markings on the Sea Hawks decal sheet for an FAA "Red Devils" display team aircraft that would look mighty fine on a two-hole Panther or Cougar, and although the conversion set's expensive, I looooove F-106Bs too......

(Do you detect an element of talking myself into it here?)

(and I just won an F-106 on ebay.....)

[GTX_Admin]

Mirage IIIT ??

[Weaver]

Mirage IIIT ??

Doh - sorry: Mirage IIID - two-seater Mirage IIIE.

This kit: http://www.modelcraftsandhobbies.co.nz/?page=shop/flypage&product_id=4599&category_id=46bf5e49e86e462f13c403ffd5bcdee2&

[Weaver]

Okay some progress. We now have a coat of Sky:





I could have spent more time getting the joints perfect but time is marching on, since I'm away for 1 weekend in August.

The paint was traumatic as always. The white undercoat showed that the fit wasn't as good as I first thought (dark plastic hides a lot!) and I had to do a fair bit of sanding back to the blue. For some reason, the subsequent (rattle can) re-undercoating wasn't as opaque as the first one, so the freshly sanded areas still looked darker. No problem, I though, the Sky will even it all out, I mean, it's darker than white, right?  Uh huh - took four coats of Sky to get an even overall colour...

Rockets have been sprayed black and I'm currently working my way through painting all the brackets and warheads aluminium. The idea, based on some pics I found on the web, is that the rocket motors have come courtesy of the RH and have been stored immaculately in a warehouse, but the warheads have come from RAF stocks in the middle east where they've been stacked outside and have all gone from green to rust from top to bottom....

[Cliffy B]

She's looking good man!!!  Its always a #$%$#^$^ trying to get light colors to coat...  I've been in arctic spree lately and have been painting ships white and pale blue for awhile.  The white....  

I DID find it a bit easier to put on after I added a tiny bit of light blue to the bottle.  I did it after reading about how to get your white models to not yellow over time.  I had a full bottle of MM White acrylic and added about 40 drops of Azure Blue with a toothpick and then mixed thoroughly.  Bottle now has a very slight blueish tint to it but I think it works.

Nice touch with the RPs.  That will add some character for sure man 

[Buzzbomb]

Moving along fine.

Must say I am really looking forward to seeing this in these colours

[Weaver]

Okay, it's masked up for the EDSG, but since it's now 2.49am here, the only thing I'm going upstairs for shortly is sleep, not paint spraying...

The tip tanks were a dilemma, i.e. how to deal with the EDSG/Sky demarcation line?. The only FAA aircraft to have tip tanks were Sea Venoms, and since they were desperately short of fuselage space for squadron badges, they usually painted the tanks in squadron colours, typically chequerboards or stripes. On the few pics I could find where they wern't stripy/squarey, they're all-Sky, which looks rubbish even if it's genuine. In the end I went for the pragmatic solution of top half EDSG, bottom half sky, on the grounds that a) it'll probably look right and b) it puts the colour demarcation right on the dodgy seam lines on the model, thereby helping to hide the latter...

Demarcation-wise, I've kept the fuselage line totally separate from the wing roots, i.e. more like an Attacker than a Sea Hawk. The bit of Sky between the fuselage line and the wing root is still narrow-enough that I had to use 3mm non-Tamiya tape on it, as well as on the curvy bits of the line since it bends better.

Just rememberd that I havn't masked up the tailplanes... Oh well, at least that's not hard....

[Weaver]

Well the EDSG is on and the masking tape is off and I'm not crying.... :)

There are a few glitches where one piece of tape met another and a few where either the tape lifted or it never fully covered the sky, but they're all fixable.

What isn't fixable is that my photobucket account has gone over it's monthly bandwidth limit again, so I can't post pictures until it resets, which will be before the end of the GB (I checked... )

[GTX_Admin]

If you like you can either upload photos to the forum or simply email them to me and I will post them.

[Weaver]

Ah - well I haven't actually taken them.....

Trying the fix the glitches in the paint is turning into a bit of a pig... Before long, there'll be so much brush-painting on it that I might as well have not bothered airbrushing it......

The trouble is that paint out of the pot, brushed on, is not exactly the same colour as the airbrushed paint, so I'm having to thin/lighten the sky by trial and error to see what works. Think the sky is acceptable now (but it depends on what light's on it), but now the EDSG needs more various touch-ups...   

[Weaver]

Well the EDSG touch-up has turned into a nightmare....

I thinned the brushed EDSG a little to get it to run and "smooth out" so that it didn't look too lumpy compared to the airbrushed EDSG. When it dried, however, it was lighter than the airbrushed EDSG.... It's as if the thinned brushed paint "lifted" the airbrushed coat underneath it, allowing more Sky to show through.

So tonight, I went over those areas again with much less thinned EDSG, and it STILL came out lighter. So I've gone over it again with un-thinned EDSG and it's STILL lighter.....

What's more, those areas are now seriously lumpy. I had to brush the whole wing-roots out to the wing fold to get some kind of blend, and the area around the cockpit now has more patch than original.

[Buzzbomb]

Bummer Weaver.

I have been in a similar situation. The way I get around it is to mask off an entire panel then paint that. If it comes up a different colour then it sort of looks ok as though the panel is a replacement or similar.

[Weaver]

Good job I wasn't depending on getting a Cougar for this build: finally found one on Kingkit two weeks ago and ordered it, still not arrived, Kingkit confirm it was sent, no red slip through the door....

[Weaver]

Right, just tried a win-or-bust approach: sanded down the wings and brush-painted them with thinned paint and a wide flat brush as per one of the Humbrol videos.

It came out rubbish...... 

It's FULL of brush-strokes, it was practically drying on the brush and it was impossible to paint smooth edge lines. In some cases the dried paint halfway down the wing was "dusty" before I'd finished the tip tank.

I'm convinced it's either the Revell paint and/or the thinner, or the combination of the two.

In any case, I'm now going to get some Humbrol 123 and thinner and try that. However, it may be too late for the Panther: it's now got so many layers of crappy paint on it that it really needs stripping back to the plastic......

[LemonJello]

Hang in there! I had to strip an MV-22 down to the plastic while I was painting a MARPAT pattern on its topsides. The black was too thin and bled under the masking tape in several places.  Sometimes its just better to go back to square one and go from there. 

I'd agree with using a different paint/thinner combo, sounds like you've got a bad batch of one or the other messing things up for you.

[Buzzbomb]

How frustrating.
I had related issues with the Buccaneer build.. I spilled a cup load of thinner on the wing.. totally trashed the paint finish.
What I did was got some "robust" ordinary masking tape and taped the engine nacelles and undersides, which were still ok,
then throughly sanded back to bare plastic the entire wing and started again.

Another of those cases where different shade of paint in this sort of area does not look out of place.

[Weaver]

Well I've severely wet-sanded the EDSG back, and spot-sanded the Sky where it had rough repairs. Once it's had time for any water in nooks and crannies to evaporate, I'm going to brush paint the whole thing with Sky. I'm going to do the Sky across the sanded EDSG bits as well, since it should "unify" their tone a bit ready for when I brush-paint them.

Whatever this comes out like, that's how it's going to stay......

[Weaver]

Okay, I'm officially a convert to brush-painting with a flat brush, thinned paint, and decent paint and thinners. Now gone from this:



To this:



I'm painting the wing and fuselage EDSG separately to avoid an awkward masking job at the wing root.

The scheme's changed a bit as well. The original narrow EDSG stripe made the fuselage look even fatter and was a nonsense from above: that scheme was developed for piston-engined fighters with narrow, slab-sided fuselages, but it just doesn't work on a circular-section early jet fuselage. So I've made two changes:

1. The "fin swerve" is now fatter to mask the blended fin ahead of the tailplanes. I did actually find a profile of a Seahawk with a a scheme like this.

2. The fuselage stripe is much fatter. The sloping demarcation line is because if you have it level, it either cuts too close to the canopy sill or makes the fin swerve too deep. From above, it really works, and that's the main thing. FAA schemes had to adapt to the aircraft they got anyway: they never had to deal with tip tanks, twin booms and cruciform tails until the Sea Venom and Seahawk came along!

The real solution for FAA jets was, of course the low demarcation line, but the Panther scheme is a product of the transition phase.

[Old Wombat]

Nice!

:)

Guy

[Brian da Basher]

That's coming along very nicely, Weaver! Few things are easier on the eyes than the old FAA scheme!

Brian da Basher

[Weaver]

Okay and we're done with main paint:



Now leaving it well alone until tomorrow night so it cures properly before I put a coat of Klear on it.

[Buzzbomb]

That looks just mighty... great recovery.
It really just sort of.. you like.. fits

[kim margosein]

Ya know, pretty much everything looks better in FAA camo.

[Jeffry Fontaine]

Another aircraft with some very good what-if potential in this same theme would be the North American A-2 (AJ) Savage in FAA markings.  Especially with the nuclear mission that it was designed for.  Late FAA Savage S.2 with Red Beard in lieu of the American Mk4 nuclear bomb or Mk6 nuclear bomb