1:144 Eurofighter Typhoon Air Power 19 building process

 

Finished seat before painting, the harnesses are made out of Tamiya masking tape and the buckles are made out of a little piece of fishing line. Tried to replicate the seat ejection handle and the fabric of the seat with milliput. Not completely pleased with the outcome but think its the best I could have achieved with milliput in this scale. Next time I use a wire for the ejection seat handle however.  

Painted seat, as suggested in the first picture, the seat ejection handle looks a bit big compared to the seat but I think in the end it will create a nice contrast in the small cockpit. 

Cockpit after painting and decal application. Unfortunately I messed up the cockpit display decal because I couldn‘t move it and it slid down somehow even more once I applied decal softener.  

 

 

Glued cockpit after matte clear coating  

Both fuselage halfs were glued together using Revell‘s Contacta Professional. The fit was exceptionally good, especially considering the scale 

I used milliput to hide the gap between the center console and the cockpit cover which was created, because the center console and the cover behind it are two independent parts, the cover behind the center console is molded in the two fuselage halfs.
To avoid this gap, the center console could be glued in the cockpit after the remaining cockpit parts and both fuselage halfs are glued togehter, because then the center console would be glued inside the cockpit and the cockpit cover aswell, thus melting both parts together. 

Both wings are were glued on. One of them took some sanding to fit seamlessly but in the end, the fit was very good here aswell 

Under the wings the were those strange gaps. They look like they are supposed to be there but all the pictures of real eurofighters, showed that there are no such gaps on the real aircraft. Thus I filled them with milliput 

Filled wing gaps and decided to fill the tiny gap at the air intake aswell, there was a triangle shaped gap, which would have been way to pronounced 

Under the vertical stabilizer is a small air intake which is molded in bigger scale models. Due to the small scale, there is not such a intake in this kit, so I made one myself. I marked the center with a hypodermic needle, then started with a 0.3mm drill bit and worked my way up in the diameter until the intake looked reasonable big.  

 

With this razor saw I seperated the flaps from the ailerons. Before this modification, there was only a panel line but with a razor saw, this is an easy and good looking improvment in my opinion. 

The module which turns this two seater variant into a single seater eurofighter was glued in place and the ramaining unpainted areas in the cockpit got painted anthracite. I mixed tamiya xf-1 and xf-66 (roughly 5:3) to create a slightly grayish black tone 

I brush painted the cockpit but unfortunately I brushed a way to thick layer which created an uneven surface especially towards the front of the cockpit(as you can see in picture 15), so I sanded everything back down and tried it another time. 

This time, the result was much better since I brushed thin coats with enough drying time in between each coat. I also added a little HUD which consists out of green nail foil glued to a piece of transparent sheet 

 

Might over done it with the silver dry brushing but it was my first time trying something like that. Also did some weathering with tamiya‘s black panel line wash to tone down the bright yellow seat ejection handle. 

Glued on the masked canopy and gave it a black layer to seal any spots where the glue didn‘t get, because if the black paint spills inside the blackish cockpit, it won‘t be so noticeable compared to the gray primer 

Glued on some details of the wings including the wing tips and masked of the areas where something gets glued on in the future like for instance the landing gear or the external fuel tank. 

Applied a good coat of gray primer to reveal all those inperfections  

 

The imperfections who were revealed by the primer were sanded down and some panel lines were also rescribed  

The white color of the landing gear bay and the air intakes was airbrushed on. Unfortunately I had to do this a second time because the air intakes are so small that more color builded up on the edges instead of reaching the deep areas of the air intake. I removed the fresh paint with thinner on the areas where too much paint accumulated and gave it another try which worked out better than the first one.  

Started to mask the landing gear bay, the bay for the main landing gear will be completely masked with just liquid masking fluid and the front one will be masked on the edges with liquid masking fluid and then stuffed with sponge 

I noticed that the masking tape of the canopy is coming of in this area. To avoid more scratches on the clear parts, I will leave the masking tape as it is and hope to be able to remove the color from the canopy afterwards. It would be a shame if the color will not come of but I am optimistic that it will, I only used tamiya acrylics so far, if any of you guys has a tip on how to remove the paint without damaging the clear part, I would be very greatful 🙂 

The air intake will be also white inside, thus I used masking tape on the border between white and main paint. Masking the air intake was actually easier than I thought.  

The fully masked air intake, I am very pleased with the result, thought it would be harder to find a good solution. 

The masking is completed. Hopefully the liquid mask will come of, I didnt use a clear coat on the white areas of the landing gear bay but I gave it a couple of days to dry however, to avoid the paint coming of with the liquid mask. The next step I will do now is to spray black paint on the entire model. Than I will do some panel highlighting with white paint because I think that panel line accent color would be way too much in this scale.  

XF-1 was airbrushed on, however as youy can see, the sanding marks are still visible. As I don't want to spray another coat of black, I will try to tone the marks down with very fine sanding paper once the color has dried properly.  

The sanding helped to tone down the areas, except this area under the canopy. I have no idea why this is so visible, either the black color has poor covering properties or I did something wrong. I think this area was created when I sanded down the first gray layer and then this transition between the colors was created.  

Because I wasn't satisfied with the result, I grabbed Tamiya's acrylic thinner and a cotton swab and removed the whole paint in the surrounding area. As this created another bad transistion between all the paint layers, I took a brush and brushed over the area, to smooth down the border between no paint and the paint layers. This worked quite good, because the paint was still wet from the thinner and the dry brush smoothed everything down.  

Then I loaded my airbrush for the second time this day with black paint. I applied a thick layer to the area, to get to the same height as all other paint layers. This time the result is much better IMO. There are however a few raised areas but those will be carefully sanded down.  

Tried pre shading for the first time. The reason why I wanted to pre shade is, because I think that panel line wash would be too pronounced on a 1:144 scale model. Also if you look at real Eurofighter pictures, most aircraft always seem to be well sought after, thus panel lines on the real bird are also not very present. The only problem was the scale (or my skill 😄). Due to the tiny panels, I needed to be very close at the model and the white paint (Tamiya XF-2) either dried on the needle of the airbrush or created spiderwebs on the model. My H&S Evolution only has a 0.6 and 0.4 nozzle, an even smaller nozzle would have been better probalby.  

 

The main color of the typhoon was finally applied. It was a bit tricky to find the right color since austrian eurofighters are painted in a different gray shade than german ones. After some testing, I chose dark gull gray (FS36231). I used a website (replikator . club) to achieve the color with tamiya acrylics. The ratio for mixing this color is: XF-83/XF-66/XF-54/XF-2 < - > 1/1/1/3 

Some other parts like the gear bay doors or the external fuel tanks were also painted in the main color. 

The leading edge of the vertical stabilizer and the air intake below were masked. The will recieve the same paint as the nose cone.  

When trying to fit the nose cone, two probelms occured. First of all, the nose cone has a bigger diameter then the mounitng cross section on the fuselage. I should have noticed this when I dry fitted everything but for some reason I completely over saw this error. In retrospect it would have been more clever to fit the nose cone on the fuselage before painting everthing since I could have sanded both the nose cone and the fuselage for perfect fitting.
The second problem: The paint of the nose cone is completely wrong. I used the paint of the revell instructions, thinking german typhoons have the same nose cone color as austrians, well, either the instructed paint is wrong or austrian EF's have a different colored nose cone. If you look at the first picture of the album, it is clearly visible that the nose cone and leading edge of the horizontal stabilizer are meant to be painted in a lighter gray tone the the remaining part of the typhoon. 

I got rid of the wrong paint and started to sand the nose cone to the desired shape. Unfortunately I was too motivated for sanding and thus I was left with a nose cone which was too small in one area now 😄. So I took some putty and worked my way up to a bigger diameter now. There is still gap left but I am happy with the result, I might glue the nose cone on prior to painting and hope the paint will cover the gap somehow. None the less, I definitely learned alot working with the nose cone 😄 

After sanding I applied a thick coat of primer. To my surprise, the transition from plastic to putty was still very visible. So I took 8000 grit sanding paper and wet sanded the area until it looked quite polished.  

I sprayed what was hopefully the last layer of primer, to see if all inperfections are gone. I was very relieved when I couldn't spot any ugly transitions since this nose cone keept me busy for many sessions and all that because of a minor sanding mistake made by me but I guess thats how you learn many things in this hobby.  

Nose cone masked of and painted 

This time I only took off a tiny part of the mask to make sure I got the right grey tone. I achieved this grey color by mixing tamiya's J.N. Grey (XF-12) and XF-2 in a 5:1 ratio. This definitely took some try and error and wrong bought Tamiya colors until I finally found the proper damn grey tone 😄  

Main color scheme finished, now there is only some masking in the jet nozzle area needed and then the gloss coat can be applied.  

This parts was sprayed in XF-16 flat aluminium 

 

After the flat aluminium was sprayed, this part was airbrushed in a similar grey tone the the J.N. Grey (XF-12) but I toned it down with some XF-66 and XF-23 because the instructions also demand a different grey tone compared to the nose cone. 

Got rid of the masking inside the landing gear stowaway and air intakes. The liquid mask was a bit hard to remove and some of the surface underneath got scratched in the process of removing it.  

The scratches inside the landing gear stowaway were fixed using only a brush and the correct color.  

Its all coming together now 🙂. All the painting was done and the jet nozzles were also glued in place. Its time for a coat of gloss varnish now and then the decals can be applied.  

Gloss coat (X-22) was applied, using 50% lacquer thinner from Tamiya. Heard that lacquer thinner gives a smoother finish. After the wet coat was sprayed, I misted the whole typhoon with pure lacquer thinner to create an even smoother finish, atleast thats what I heard on a youtube video. I was very cautious with the pure thinner however, since I saw what lacquer thinner did to old paint in my spray booth compared to X-20A acrylic thinner  

Tried to hide this mistake I made by sanding the clear coat with 8000 grit sandpaper. Unfortunately it seemed to not work and I also didnt want to risk damaging the main paint job.  

The decals by "Brent-Air-Decals". They are printed on one single sheet of carrier film, so every decals needs to cut out precisely in order to hide the carrier film as good as possible. There are some entertaining hours of decaling to be done 😄 

First decals were applied, you can even hardly see then in the picture. Some of the decals like the "100.000 flying hours" don't need to be applied since there is a special livery decal sheet of the "Airpower19" which excludes some of those decals.  

Due to the university test-phase and the high amount of tiny decals, I was gone from here for some time as you can see by the date of the last uploaded picture. But now its done 🙂 around 85 small decals and stencils were applied and I am very happy with the result. Next step will be to seal the decals with another coat of gloss coat and the I can start with some light weathering.  

Allthough I said that I wont use panel line wash, I thought that a minor wash would improve the look of the EF and since this is basically my first model, I need to learn as much as I can from it 

All the parts including the EF were wheatered, mainly with basic panel line wash except the belly of the typhoon where I used AK‘s Engine Oil wheatering product to give the underside a slightly brownish tone which can be seen on pictures of real typhoons aswell 

Painted the shock absorbers of the landing gear with the Molotow Chrome pencil, I was really surprised with the finish, I never thought chrome paint could look so realistic. Only thing to mention: They have to be covered when the matt clear coat is applied or otherwise it will look more like brushed aluminium 

The external fuel tanks were glued on and I did some touch ups on the tires. The finish line is already in sight! 🙂  

In picture 28 I mentioned that there is some masking tape coming of the canopy and I also saw that there was a bit of paint already underneath on the canopy. Having this in mind, I was really scared of taking the masking tape of, expecting a bit mess on the canopy, which would need alot of clean up. To my surprise this wasn’t the case at all, there was a tiny part of paint on the canopy but I could scratch it away using a regular tooth pick. I think this worked so well, because when I started building the model, I had no lacquer primer, so I just used acrylic grey paint. This however sealed the exposed surface and the lacquer clear coat couldn‘t do any damage to the canopy and it could be scratched away easily. So there we are now 🙂 only the landing gear and the canards need to be glued in place and then the model is basically finished. I might buy a Harder and Steenbeck Infinity soon and the I will add some minor APU stains to the model, my current Evolution only has a 0.4mm nozzle and I wont risk to mess up the model buy applying too much black paint 

 

The tires and landing gear bay covers were glued in place. The stains of the APU were not airbrushed, I decided to use black pigment which was applied with a toothpick and it stuck quite good to the satin vernish. Because the excess glue on the covers was shiny, I applied another thin coat of satin varnish, which also fixed the pigments permanently in place. This also means that the build comes to an end. Since this is my first proper build, I learned a ton and I really enjoyed building it. Some mistakes were made but I wont make the same mistakes on the next build, hopefully 😉 A big thank you to all the people whom left nice comments and liked the album! I made some nice pictures with my DSLR Camera, I will upload them after this picture.