So I finally got to fixing the problem with the intake. Taking the suggestion of KGM (a member of Plamo), I removed the rough patches by wetting the tip of a cotton bud with lacquer thinner and basically swishing inside the intake, removing all the offending paint. Then I proceeded to very carefully mask the inside of the intake and stuff the rest with tissue. Then it's just a matter of sprayng the color I want. I ended up having to fix some blemishes with the paintbrush. The brushmarks should be covered up by subsequent weathering.

Onto the tiny details!

The inflight refueling door is supposed to be a natural metal color so I masked the section off and sprayed on some gun metal on it. Ended up being quite subtle which I like.

I then hand painted the tips of the intake pods and the RWR 'beercans' pods.

Tomorrow I will start the decaling process! HOOZAAAAH!

Back to the Viper! Now it's time for all the itty-bitty details. First up are the weapons. Aggressor aircraft are usually armed with one inert AIM-9 Sidewinder and an ACMI (Air Combat Maneuvering Instrumentation) pod. I got these from Hasegawa's Aircraft Weapons Sets C and D respectively. The inert (blue) bands are not included so I had to mask off and paint the bands.

Inert rounds and ACMI pods come in a variety of colors actually. Red, blue, white and various shades of grey. I went with grey as it's the color shown in my reference photos.

Typically for me, something bad happens to my builds about 70% into the project. I'd then have to spend some time and elbow grease to fix the problem(s). I thought it won't happen for this one, seeing as how I was 90% into the build. But Mr. Murphy must have known and well... disaster has struck.

In my zeal to quickly finish this thing, I decided to use spray paint to finish the inside of the air intake. And in my zeal to get it over quickly, the spraypaint ended up being too thick. Sigh... so now the air intake looks like something exploded in it and messed up the lip.

After looking at it for 15 minutes, I realized there's only 2 things that can be done:

1. Carefully saw the lip and the intake apart then paint separately. Of course that would mean having to fix the whole outside of the intake later
2. Keep things as is and slowly sand the inside of the lip smooth and redo the color again

Of course, I also realized I should have keep them separate in the first place. But I'm an idiot.

Both aren't easy solutions, but I'm leaning towards the latter. Which still bugs me either way. More delay! Pah!

Another 3 months has gone by and we have moved to our own place. Ongoing house matters put this on the backburner. Now it's back on the worktable.

Gear has now been painted and ready for assembly. Unlike some modelers, I don't even try to mask the wheels before painting the tires. I just freehand everything. Carefully. Aircraft kits tend to have a lot of itty-bitty parts so this might take awhile even after everything has been put together.

I... am... edging... closer... to... finishing!

Crap. It's been almost 3 months since I did anything else to this build. Today, I finally got around fixing the demarcation lines. And boy did I have a 'great' time doing it.

First I used blutack to mask all over the kit. And ended up not doing anything to it for 3 weekends. And what happened? For some reason the blutack left some sort of residue that of course, couldn't be rubbed off. So I ended up having to spray everything all over again.

So what I did was for each color, I'd slowly blutack and spray to fix the soft camouflage pattern. Took awhile. Over 3 weekends in fact. But I... am... done! In the process however, I lost the shade of green I originally used, so I ended up respraying all the green again. I also quickly masked off the grey parts and sprayed that on too. The left stablizer also fell off but that's a small easy fix. So all the major parts (except for the parts that need to be white) are... done! BOO YEAH!

Here's a before and after look at the camo:

Up next will be the rest of the detail parts. Won't be long now. Won't be long...

Well it rained the next day so I had to defer the 3rd color till this weekend. And this one was quickly finished up.

I must say the green is now much easier to put on than the two previous colors. I'll chalk it up to being more used to airbrushing again I guess.

Based on the reference photo, my demarcation lines are too soft. To be honest, I don't have that much confidence I can make them sharper by freehand. So after I have allowed some time for the paint to cure (mostly likely a week heh), I'll take out my bluetack and proceed to do guides so I can respray the lines.

Stay tuned.

Painting continues. Today I originally planned to repaint the light brown. But then after the sun, I noticed that... hey... the color's not that bad! Sure it lacks a bit of the reddish tone that the reference pic had, but at least it doesn't look too yellow under the sun. So I decided to leave it as is since after my planned oil wash, the light brown will tone down considerably.

So on to the second color: dark brown. This is also straight from the bottle Vallejo Model Color 'Red Brown'. While it turned out to be lighter than what I wanted, again the planned oil wash will tone down the shade.

The demarcation lines are all done freehand. Badly I might add. I really need to remaster my airbrush. As it is, the lines are really soft. More suitable for 1/35 scale. Reference photos show relatively tight demarkation lines. Not solid, just a bit soft. Grrr... looks like I will have to take out my stash of bluetack and do the demarkation lines that way.

I suck.

Anyway, hopefully I can add the final camouflage color tomorrow.

Painting commences. The camouflage I am going to do is the 'Flogger' scheme, which tries to replicate the MiG-23/27 Flogger color scheme as flown by ex-Eastern-Bloc Air Forces. Markings will be from TwoBobs' 48-001 'Fighting Fulcrum' sheet. The sheet includes a camouflage guide which I use to trace the camo pattern onto the kit with a soft pencil.

Strangely though, some of the camouflage do not match up when put onto the kit so I did some guesstimation and compromised some here and there to get the final guides done.

The weather turned out to be good. It was dry and sunny out. So on with the lightest color first. And that would be light brown. I decided to use Buff straight from the bottle. After about an hour or so of spraying, the rain clouds started gathering, which in turn turned up the humidity, which in turn cuased water to seep into my airbrush, which in turn caused it to spray water onto my kit instead of paint. Damn. Had to stop after only magaing to finishing up the bottom. Oh well.

After I was done, I compared the resulting color I got with a reference picture I got from Airliners.net. The Buff turned out to be too yellowish. Gotta figure out a way to fix it in the next session.

While I know that colors of the real aircraft differs in each photo, I think mine differs way too much to be excused heh.

I say. This project has been ongoing (mostly off) for almost 3 years! Who would have thunk. Time sure flies. Anyhow, before I get bitched to death by my friends who know about this project, I decided I really have to finish this one. So anyhow, I still don't have a proper workdesk, but I lugged my compressor to the porch and started spraying on the steps. And here's what I got so far after an hour.

There's still some mistakes here and there but I thought, what the heck. I have to finish this quickly or it'll forever in my Projects list.

I must say it's quite fun to finally be able to airbrush again. I was very rusty though. Just look at the left wing which was where I started. The preshade's very roughly done. Normally my preshades are quite roughly done, but this one is really quite bad heh. By the time I got to the right wing though, I was starting to get the hang of controlling my double action airbrush again. Hopefully tomorrow the weather will hold. Then can slap on the camouflage colors!

ONWARD HO!

Wow... it's been almost exactly 1 year since I last touched this kit, no wonder the others in the so-called groupbuild kept harassing me no end over this one Hahahaha

So anyways no pictures but I was busy last night sanding and rescribing some of the problem areas. I must say it's quite fun to be able to do model kits again heh...

I fixed some of the problems on the bottom of the kit too since I do suffer some form of 'I know it's there' syndrome even though since it's at the bottom, no one will be able to see the mistakes. So besides sanding the intake area, I also added more putty to the major problem areas, namely the bottom of the wing.

Alright! Finally the priming's done and lo and behold... stuff to fix. Man... when will I learn to be more careful during the construction phase? Brrr...

Here are the spots I found on top of the kit that need further fixing.

Not as many problems as I've foreseen, but still... it ain't perfect. Oh well. There were also some problems at the bottom of the kit. During construction, I paid more attention to the top of kit since that's what everyone will see first (hardly anyone will purposely flip the kit and look at the bottom) so there are actually a lot more problems to fix. However, since it is the bottom afterall, I decided to just fix the major ones hehehe...

The good news in all this is that the RWR sensors turned out very nice and I don't have to make any further changes to them. Score!

Oh bugger. It rained in the morning which ended up being a muggy afternoon which isn't good for any sort of painting. So I couldn't do the priming. Sigh...

So the only update here is a small old one. The canopy had a big seamline running down the middle so I scraped it off with a hobby knife and slowly sanded the area with ever finer sandpaper, ending with 400 grit. Then I dipped the canopy into Future floor polish to give it a supershine. To top it off, I carefully masked the canopy with Tamiya masking tape. To attach to the kit, I would use white glue as it dries transparent.

Here's hoping tomorrow will be a bright sunny day...

Yep. Been awhile. My mates in the groupbuild has also been bugging me no end hehehe. So anyway, a lot has been done and I'm ready to prime the kit, fix some obvious problems then start painting. Small mistakes can be hidden pretty easily since I'm going to do some weathering. I can't stand clean aircraft. :P

I tried out a new method of filling the gaps: liquid paper aka correction fluid. This was suggested by a good friend G-Man from the Plamo Forums. Applying is easy: just whack on a dollup onto the gap. Then I ran a cotton bud with Gunze thinner through it, which thins and softens the liquid paper and makes it flow flush. So it works, I'm just now sure how it will look after priming. We'll see.

I also added all the major not too fragile parts onto the kit, so I can paint in one shot. I guess in this sense, aircraft kits are actually easier to paint than mecha kits. So anyway, all the tiny sensor bumps and blades are added.

Next came the RWR sensors on the wings. These are the major parts that are missing from the kit which is too bad since they are quite obvious on the real aircraft. A bit of a challenge to scratchbuild them since the RWR sensors have an odd shape. They are pretty small so I decided to just make a general likeness hehe.

Next up: priming and fixing all the big problems that popup.

I decided that with the F-16's huge canopy, I needed the ejection seat to be more detailed than what came in the box. So I got hold of a pair of ACES II resin seats from Legends Productions, a Korean resin kit manufacturer. The resin seat comes with molded-on seat belts and is generally much more detailed than the default kit seat.

I colored the seat based on references I got from The Ejection Site. A simple wash with diluted black color and some minor drybrushing is all I need to add depth and bring out the fine details of the seat.

This kit is part of the 'US Aggressors groupbuild'. Construction went on quite straightforward although there are some problems here and there. Nothing that putty couldn't fix though. One particularly annoying part is that I have to putty off the holes under the wings meant for underwing stores. Obviously if I was bulding a normal F-16 loaded with a ton of weapons I wouldn't be bitching.

As per normal with aircraft kits, the cockpit has to be painted first before further construction could be done. It's simple matter of grey for the whole cockpit tub, black for the control panels, green for the MFD screens and some drybrushing to bring out the detail of the control surfaces.