Panavia Tornado

Cockpit crewed and painted.

Tonka will be posed flying with wings fully swept. The central fuselage was quite out of square where the cockpit section joins. It formed a parallelogram and the top and bottom of the wing roots were about 2mm offset. I used a little brute force to try and square them up and let the joint set overnight before mounting the cockpit section. I also chose to fit the air inlets to the cockpit sides and allow them to set up before bringing the two assemblies together.

Colour is dark grey with a drop of PRU blue as I didn't have the 'proper' grey. I let this dry well before masking for the green to minimise the risk that it would be damaged by masking. Getting a good match for any repairs would be tricky.

I don't really like masking for overall camouflage schemes, but I really wanted to do the version equipped with HARM missiles.

The green got two coats on the bottom. I'm probably a bit heavy-handed with the masking putty and it started to drip.

Port wing is missing the inner pylon. The kit fixes each pylon with a tiny plastic 'circlip' to allow them to be rotated to suit wing sweep angle, but one went walkies after the wing halves were bonded.

Camouflaged stores and the errant pylon painted.

Masking for the top really only begins at the rear of the cockpit, but still needs a lot of putty.

I extended the wings to match the painting chart in the instructions.

I tried to match the intersection points of the two colours with what I had already done on the underside.

The putty slowly flows over time, especially as the model is handled to position other pieces. This does tend to improve curves, but it can lead to distortions. As I start with the lighter colour (grey) and mask it to add the darker colour (green) using an even darker coloured putty, I'm basically forming a negative image of the illustration in the instruction sheet, which can be confusing.

The above comments are my excuse for any differences between the intended scheme and what I ended up with. There are now some metallic grey panels to be added and I may 'correct' some of the green at the same time. The starboard side of the massive vertical stabiliser would be a prime candidate for improvement, but I'm reasonably satisfied with the 'overall' effect.

I couldn't resist tinkering with some of the green areas by brushing freehand. Metallic panels on the fin and at the gun ports were masked and airbrushed. The exposed tip of the refuelling probe was also brush painted.

Black panels on wingtips and fin and in front of cockpit were masked and sprayed. Exhaust was also sprayed and the seals between wings and fuselage were brush painted.

Posed like boxart for temporary cover shot.

Ready to bring this thing to life

Days later and decals nearly finished!

Finished now!

As soon as I added the pitot tube, it fell on its nose, twice.

Boxart pose, well almost.

The fins on the fuel tanks are on backwards. I realised this as I was halfway through decalling them. The boxart is wrong too, so I have some excuse. The fins get quite close the horizontal stabilisers when the wings are at maximum sweep, so reversing them might have been a real world fix.