Italeri | 802 | 1:48 | Northrop F-5A
OOB build of the vintage '98 Italeri 1/48 kit.
Another reasonably priced; bashed box, eBay find!
Unboxing, adding fishing weights, nose wheel work and simple cockpit interior painting.
Aside from a mildly warped tail section (sorted with a trip to the hairdressers) it all went together pretty well. Apart from...
The rear fuselage section... Lot of work went on here to ensure (some sort of) flat panel and remove the middle seam. In the end I gave up (somewhat)!
Wet + dry sanded and then matt Vallejo black primed.
Adding back in the raised panel lines, sorting out the huge injection marks. Later body is painted with Vallejo gloss primer.
First ever go with Vallejo Metal Color Aluminium - discovered it behaves differently to normal Vallejo paint and I'll need to lower/learn the PSI required for an even flow (Pearl Jam)!
Adding back in a levels of paint where I've sanded flat finish, will then flatten back again to touch in with the Metal Color.
Cleaning up and adding raised panel lines. Aft fuselage looks better, but acknowledge it's far from perfect.
Beginning to get a nicer overall finish...
Starting the masking process for panel tonal variations - my photos don't really show this very well as an end result.
More masking...
Tone and shade - trying both hand wash and airbrush techniques to see what I like/works. Kit is a bit agricultural in the undercarriage area!
Getting somewhere... It's not particularly accurate, but it's added some depth/interest to an otherwise flat colour scheme.
Painting the armaments and trying to work with the aged useless decals - now gonna have to mask and paint these red lines instead.
Masking for the black. You can also see I've worked down the strength of tones on panels too.
The black line decals I discovered were unusable with this kit - in fact it's truly remarkable I got any of these aged decals to work. I'm gonna have to hand paint the wing lined black markings instead. Masking to do this...
Painting.
Not bad. Will discover later that I shouldn't have painted where the Spanish roundels are going! You can see some panel variation in tone here.
As the cockpit is so sparse I decided to use the rather 'chunky' pilot. He did end up better painted than shown here! Also added metallic tonal variation to the wing hardpoints and hand-painted canopy inside and out.
Adding more general wear and tear - or in other words ruining my earlier work! Vallejo, Humbrol and Tamiya powders in use here...
Almost there... I could do with one of those flash building berths/jigs everyone else seems to have!
And we're done! 🙂 canopy is not fixed, opening as the original kit intended.
Comentarios
33 29 March 2021, 17:16
NeilThanks Arif! Considering the standard of builds you present, 100% appreciate you taking time to comment. Very kind.
6 August 2021, 13:40
NeilPraise from you is much appreciated... Thanks very much for your feedback Daniel! Chuffed! 🙂
6 August 2021, 15:48
NeilHi Erik, thanks very much for your comment - yes I had noted your work/album and the YF-12 also (what an aircraft!) - both of your builds look to be FANTASTIC of course 😉
6 August 2021, 16:07
NeilThanks for commenting Nathan, praise from you is of course much appreciated. 👍
7 August 2021, 09:24
NeilThanks very much Neuling 🙂 You're very kind - my first use of (proper) Vallejo metal color in use here. I'm on a bit of a learning curve with how they behave, trying to get some tonal variations in there 🙂
7 August 2021, 11:36
JohnNice build; F-5s are wonderful jets. I agree with you on Vallejo metal colors as I like the idea of spraying a less toxic paint, but it is finicky to get good results.
9 August 2021, 12:32
NeilHi John, thanks very much for your kind comment and feedback 🙂 I sort of figured out a decent PSI partway through, also changing from a cheap KKMoon airbrush to a Sparmax one, so that made it better also 👍
9 August 2021, 12:38
Slavo HazuchaWow - a kit with tooling significantly older than me! 🙂
Fascinating to see how while kit detail is on a completely different level, some base parameters, like general fit, seems to be better than on one or the other modern kits...
Nice job you pulled on this one, pretty cool finish in metal 👍
9 August 2021, 13:17
NeilHi Slavo - Ha! Ha! Yeah, me too... I hear you! Time ticks on... Yes, I have a like of the vintage (old) Italeri/Hobbycraft kits - I just sort of ended up with a stash of them.
Thanks very much for taking the time to leave an encouraging comment and feedback - very much appreciated from you indeed 🙂
9 August 2021, 15:04
Album info
Hi there,
Thanks for stopping by to view my latest build #28 the Northrop F-5A.
I build straight 'out-of-the-box' endeavouring to show the build journey in as few photographs as possible - this is my reason for utilising montage imagery to help reduce the image count of an album.
This build was uploaded on the 9th August 2021.
I hope that the you find my build journey informative and helpful.
