What's on my desk? Part 37.

Another Tuesday, another blog post. Welcome!

Progress has been made on the Sea Harrier and the houses this week.

Let's start with the Harrier.

Last time I glued the fuselage halves together. Fit was okay, but it needed some filling here and there. I opted for Tamiya grey putty this time, because the seam needed to be levelled and sanded. This is relatively easy. Take a toothpick, apply the putty along the seam, let dry and sand.

Now the seam is gone, but you've probably also sanded away some of the panel lines. To reconstruct these, I used a Tamiya scribing tool to reapply the lines. To guide your scriber, use some thick plastic tape. Dymo labeller tape works perfectly. In the picture you can see how the rectangular hatches along the midline were re-scribed. The rounded corners are a bit of a challenge to do cleanly, though.

I sometimes get the question (or see it asked on modelling groups): 'When do you paint? Do you paint on the sprue, or only when everything is assembled?' And the answer to that is: it depends. The main question you need to ask yourself is: 'will I be able to reach this particular spot once assembled?' I've got two areas here that deserve a closer look. The first is pretty obvious: the air intake duct for the engine. It needs to be white, the rotor blades are silvery-metal. This is something that will be impossible to airbrush cleanly once assembled. So I taped off the rotor (which was already painted) in such a way that I will be able to remove the tape later, and airbrushed the duct Insignia White. This will need to be taped off as well before spraying the rest of the plane, but it already has a nice smooth coat of paint.

A second area that needed attention is just above the exhaust nozzles. The fuselage makes a curve there that, with the wings attached, will be impossible to airbrush. So I gave it a brushed coat of flat black, then went over it with the Extra Dark Sea Gray that will be the main colour of the plane. It doesn't need to be perfect, but if I don't do this, there will be an ugly area of unpainted plastic at that point. While I had the black paint out, I filled in the exchaust shrouds on the inside, just in case.

Last thing: the wings. This is where it pays to dry-fit. I noticed the trailing edge was too thin, creating a step in the top surface. To fix this, I used small pieces of white Evergreen strip styrene (0.4 x 2.5 mm in this case, but there's dozens of sizes) to close the gap and lift the edge.

You can see the tiny white piece sandwiched between wing and fuselage in the picture below. It still needs some filling, but the whole assembly is better aligned, saving me a lot of sanding.

Speaking of assembly: I had to clamp the wing down hard to make sure there was a snug fit all around. I used some small pieces of tape to hold the clamps in place and prevent damage.

So far so good for the Sea Harrier. On to the houses.

I made a start with the windows. First of all, all the frames were painted. I opted for wood finish on the grey house, white-grey for the café.

A light wood grain was made with oil paint over a tan colour.

The white-grey was done with Citadel Corax White.

That's the outer frames done. The inner frames were painted on the sprue.

The frames are then cut out, dry fitted and sanded (what feels like) a few hundred times until they drop in without pressure. They have to fit perfectly, because the plastic is incredibly brittle. The attachment points on the sprue are way too close to the part and I've broken both of these two frames in two different spots already. It's easy to glue back together, but any excess pressure to fit them will result in more breakages...These are rectangular, so pretty straightforward to sand, but the top frame of the windows is rounded. I'm foreseeing a lot of cursing in the near future...

Once sanded to fit, they're glued onto a sheet of transparent plastic. Once dry, I can cut them out and fit them into the outer frames.

 

That's all I have right now.

See you next week!