Chronic's Research and Aeronautics Project (C.R.A.P.)

[DogfighterZen]

 

[NARSES2]

The parts were never off the sprue, I just turned 4 individual sprue into one single sprue because spraying one sprue, one time, is easier and quicker than spraying four seperate sprues four separate times.   

Right,  I think I understand, and if I do so 

[Old Wombat]

Wooo!!!! I like to live life on THE EDGE. 


That said, I think we may have disovered a new facet of the hobby.... DECONSTRUCTION. Take a built kit, dissasemble it and glue all teh parts back onto the sprues and make it into a kit again instead of a built piece.     What's funny... is... I GUARANTEE you some poor sap somewhere has attempted it. I'm surprised at NOTHING any more. 

Even more fun if it's a random sprue dug out of the sprue bin.

[TheChronicOne]

The parts were never off the sprue, I just turned 4 individual sprue into one single sprue because spraying one sprue, one time, is easier and quicker than spraying four seperate sprues four separate times.   

Right,  I think I understand, and if I do so 

I wouldn't bother if I weren't priming them but this way it keeps everything in one place so I don't lose the smaller sprues that only have 2-3 parts on them and then it's much easier to prime up and then paint.

If they were all separate still, I'd have to likely make two trips to carry the stuff outside, then I'd have to find something to hold the smaller ones because I don't want to paint my hand, then, I'd also have to make sure they were weighed down somehow so they don't get knocked over from the force of the paint coming out of the rattle can. This way, I can just hold this single sprue by one end, paint it.... let it dry a couple minutes, then grab it by the other end and finish it. Saves a lot of time and hassle this way and makes for a more orderly work space, too, not having to keep track of a bunch of individual sprue pieces.

Lazy people are great at finding ways to cut corners and streamline things. The world needs more lazy people!   

[TheChronicOne]

Wooo!!!! I like to live life on THE EDGE. 


That said, I think we may have disovered a new facet of the hobby.... DECONSTRUCTION. Take a built kit, dissasemble it and glue all teh parts back onto the sprues and make it into a kit again instead of a built piece.     What's funny... is... I GUARANTEE you some poor sap somewhere has attempted it. I'm surprised at NOTHING any more. 

Even more fun if it's a random sprue dug out of the sprue bin.

Evil!!!        Speaking of sprue bin... mine is starting to look like a spaghetti explosion. I considered dumping a bunch into a jar with some heavy duty spirits and making my own filler but uhh.... I have enough of that to last 3-4 years as it is so might just throw most of it out. I considered making a Borg cube, but that sounds like work. 

[TheChronicOne]

Just got done doing my taxes and I ready to huck my computer out the friggin' window. 


But that's alright....... Today I plan to PSR all the patch work on the Liberty and also paint the fiddly stuff. I'll figure out how to approach the next phase of repairing the cockpit situation and proceed with that, as well. I'm getting closer and closer to "having something" with this one! 

Similar action on the Raptor. I need to finish cleaning up the seams on the plane itself then I can prime it. I'm ready to prime all the fiddly bits, too, for the most part. Some may need a little more filing and sanding but they're mostly ready.

Airliner still sitting around waiting for the nose weight glue to dry up. I bet it takes a couple weeks!! It's in NO HURRY. 

That's all for now. It's going to be really warm today so I will be doing outside work until my back and my sciatica problems start to go out of control and force me back inside. I need to wash the dog and my truck, both. It's starting to get embarassing driving the truck around and Buddy is just a dirty puppy dog. 

[TheChronicOne]

I was outside most of the day trying to get ready for spring. Washed my truck finally, a couple mowers, and the dog.     Did some other odds and ends of outside work while it's above 80 degrees. 


Back inside now!!! Almost time to swill some beer like a slob and work on plastic atrocities! Well, I've already been working on plastic atrocity.... 

Did a bunch of filing and sanding on the Liberty on the things like the intakes and the new stuff I added. It's all pretty smooth, now! Had to do a little more to the canopy itself and now it sits well. I still need to do more work around the cockpit tub edges but I'll do that once all the canopy work is finish because there's no point in doing it now. To that end:



Getting there. This is what I was talking about earlier, though.... this thing is out-of-whack in more ways than one. Good news is the alignment between the forward face of the canopy and the rear face of the windscreen are lining up better. The main issue is the height difference! I'll attack that two ways: sanding down the top of the nose a bit and also sanding the windscreen itself. Not too much of either, though!! I may wind up having to raised the canopy up a tiny bit but I can only DO a tiny little bit because I'd then need to file more of it away to get the back to line up with the roof!  In short.. I'll have to be careful. 

For now I'm going to open up a beer and start cramming it down my gullet. Next, I'm going to work on the Raptor. I may need to put some more filler here and there but it's mainly good to go and all I'll really need to do is some sanding. Won't be long and I'll be able to put the fins on and I think at that point nothing else goes on until later???  If that's the case, I'll go ahead and finally glue the canopy on and prime it.

[kitnut617]

OK, so now you lay some styrene strip along the canopy rail ledge, like how I did here.



I had to do that to raise my canopy up a bit to line up with the windshield.

[DogfighterZen]

Ya, what Kitnut is showing in the pics!
Don't sand the fuselage any more, you just have to add material to the bottom of the canopy's framing to raise it like he shows in his pics. Sanding more of the fuselage can end up making it worse than it is now, besides being much more work to get right.

[TheChronicOne]

Oooh yeah... I'm liking this. 

If I raise the canopy it will be above the roof line....  I'd have to build some sort of little hump back there. Shouldn't be too difficult to do, though, and would look pretty cool and add a bit more nuance to the plane to set it apart from a stock F-5!! 

Hell yeah... I'm starting to fall back in love with this project all of a sudden!!     Thanks for the tips!!

I don't know what I'd do without yous guys!  And........   funny,... I'm having flashbacks from back when I used to do construction-ey type things for a living for some odd reason.     

[TheChronicOne]

Yeah buddy! I can't go wrong with this help.  Thanks again folks.. 

This is just loosely mocked up but already I've applied y'alls advice and find myself closer to the goal:



I now have a new gap to deal with at the rear but.... that's minor at this point! I'm so glad that this cockpit area is coming together.

Now.. I'm going to quit while I'm ahead.    I think I've had a relatively productive time of it trying to advance this lil jet so it's a guilt-free ordeal to just put it away..   

EDIT: Oh, and I was wrong about the "hump", thank god...       Looks like I won't be needing that. 

[DogfighterZen]

Another thin styrene strip on the back so you can sand it down without risk of creating a gap again. 

[TheChronicOne]

Right on!! I'll try to get that sorted today, among other things. If I can get that done, I can go ahead and cut out the belly section so I can build a new gear bay as most of it went with the nose I chopped off. That will take a little time but will be easy comparatively speaking. After that.. I can FINALLY get back to re-shaping the actual fuselage to get it lined up with the nose then I can glue it on. That's the part I looking forward to. See the nose on and cruciform tail.... well... at that point this is no longer an F-5! 

Raptor seam work should be getting close to completion today as well.  I'm in no hurry on this one, though.  I went into it with a time budget of 8 months so I'm clearly way ahead of schedule! 

The airliner... well, the sink marks in the nose are finally STARTING to dry up. I estimate another 4 days minimum on that. I can go ahead and start working on the engines and get all the rest of the stuff I can do done on it. This isn't the first time I've done this method for nose weight and it's never been a problem before.. I get the impression that this plastic is pretty soft so perhaps that's why. Oh well, no matter!!  Simple problem to solve, just, waiting..... it sucks.

Probably finally start the D.21, too. Depends on how I feel and how motivated I am to fire up the video games. Been playing Far Cry 4 and making a lot of head way. The more progress I make, the more motivated I am to keep going (like with most anything, I suppose) and I've been having fun doing it so I might lose time to that today. 

[TheChronicOne]

The motivation has arrived and I decided to jump into painting fiddy bits and getting them all refined. The FRANKENSPRUE started coming apart and two sections came apart as I handled the stuff but that's ok because I just needed it for priming. Now I'm into actually hairy stickin' it all.



At this point I ran into a problem!!! Them old-azz WWII Mustang bombs.    All this is make-believe anyway but I still feel a responsibility to try to adhere somewhat to historcial accuracies so that my what-if less "fantasy" and more "plausible." To that end, I decided to turn them into "smaller" napalm canisters. I'll have to re-paint them but that's alright.. at least now they have a "reason" for being and a story behind them.

At this point I started trimming out and painting the rest of it. I'm using A-4 Skyhawk pics as reference. Turns out things like door edges and the like were painted red.... so I did that. Going to look cool! I also finished up the gear and glued the tires to the main ones. I haven't done anything (aside from building half a tire and priming) to the nose gear as I still need to elongate it. Painted the pilot, too!!



I've done more in the way of refining the cockpit as well but that's slower going as I reinforce things and wait on glue to dry. I'll go in for another round of PSR on all that in the next phase but headway is being made, for sure.

Underway with PSR on the Raptor, too... doing all the wing edges and main seams. It's a lot closer to being primed but nothing worthy of pictures yet. Glad to be started on it, though, for sure!

That's it for now. I'm going back to the video games for awhile. Well, after this Youtube video is over... man there are some cool vids on there with Swiss F-5s generally being badass. 

[TheChronicOne]

Back at it. Did some pre-dawn work this morning for about half an hour. Can't recall all of it but some was filling sink marks on this Liberty and a couple spots on the nose of the Raptor where I went heavy with glue and melted more than I wanted to. This afternoon, I'm working on the cockpit of the Liberty again. It's closer than ever!!



Won't be too long and it will be done. Still plenty of refinement to do, however, not the least of which is to "lessen" the fact that the canopy, at the end of all of this, is wider than the fuselage still. I was hoping that problem would have solved itself by now, but not so much!    I'll get to that at some point today or later this week.... it just depends on how swiftly I get the rest of it up to standard.

I'm going to stop working on this for now while I let some more glue dry up as filler and will shift back to the fiddly bits. I need to finish painting the napalm and start the nose gear elongation project. For that, I think I have some stuff in the spare parts stash that ought to work.. I seem to recall some 1/144 JU88 main gear struts that ought to be the right size and have the right "look."