SPA Modeler

Hi all,

And 1st of all, again many thanks for all the positive & nice comments!

I had to take an almost 2 weeks break due to other "urgent" things that annoyingly came in between....

But I was able to attach at least the wings into the fuselage and do even some testfitting of the landing gears, etc etc before the 2 weeks "quarantine" started...



--

So, the 1st thing when back in business was to fix the wingtip issue..

I glued a tiny piece of Evergreen to fill the missing tip



and then just sanded it to right shape and finally I could use my riveting tool (a la Trumpeter) that has been lying in a drawer since I bought it (6-7 months ago)



Perhaps not so visible in the pic, but indeed, there are a couple of identical "rivets" in the white evergreen plastic piece... :-)
The riveting tool works actually much better than I expected!

(And yes I am very aware of the fact, that to make those (in total 3) rivets would not have needed a riveting tool, but but... I had the tool and it felt ok to turn the riveting wheel about 20 degrees to make those couple of rivets...)

And as earlier said, this version of the Hellcat does not have any weaponry. Therefore I decided simply to fill them up with a piece of sprue (that I had streched to cone shape ) that I just sticked into the holes with a little bit Tamiyas Extra thin glue.






Jumped straight into next phase, in other words I wanted to see how the red colour would look like, so I made some "testing" on the Hellcats cowling..

From Alleycats decal painting scheme I could read that the red (or Gloss Insignia Red) equals with FS11136 + a number of Humbrol, Lifecolor etc codes. Unfortunately my local paint provider only have Revell paints.. And I did not have the patience to wait for couple of days delivery... Therefore by using this excellent Color-chart web-page http://www.paint4models.com/paintchart/ ... 0101e.htm#
I was able to find a suitable substitute from Revell, and that was "Fiery Red", 36131.

Below the result of testing..



Next steps (steps that was supposed to be done already 2 weeks ago... ), mr Surfacer and some sanding of the fuselage & wings before the first layer of primer will be applied...

- Kari

Wow, nice progress Kari!
I really like that orange, maybe it is a bit bright and glossy, but it eyes quite awesome on that nose cowling.
Also very nice how you fixed those gun ports with the stretched sprue.

With regards, Ninetalis.

Great job repairing the missing wing tip, Kari! I like your idea to fill the gun ports!

If you paint the whole kit in this bright red you simply could add some Ferrari decals to have a really different build!

Looks as you have beaten this one into submission with some excellent scratch "repairs" Awesome!

Man the paint on that cowling is incredible! Very nice!

Hello Guys,

I have had extremely busy times, which more or a less has totally cut off my time with this stuff.. So finally some "own" time and hopefully some time to start to catch-up what's going on here.. Well, of course I have kept an eye, but very passively....

But first a very brief update on my Hellcat..

A layer of colour has been applied (already some weeks ago)... Somehow I am not so satisfied with the result... and that is perhaps the reason that the Hellcat is now on the shelf waiting for some motivation boost...



BUT, luckily there are other projects in the pipe... :-)

- Kari

Hi, Kari! You have been missed. Could you weather/fade it down a notch or two? Perhaps it looks too good right now?

Thanks Lyle,

and indeed.. it certainly will need a touch or two of weathering and so... It's just in an after-paint state... And missing all details etc...

So at this moment the Hellcat will rest a little bit and other "projects" take over..

- Kari

Thats pretty friggin neat KS.

The paint looks great to me. What is it that you don't like?