The Ship Model Forum

Ryan my friend I am very sorry for your loss, I will keep you and your family in my thoughts and prayers.
I quit models for a long time when I lost both my parents just 80 days apart, dad first then mom, I am glad to see your working through it. If you need anything we are here for you.

Take care my friend, planes are looking great.

Thank you for the kind words my friends.

Well, I have a little bit of progress to report. I am really struggling to get back into the modeling zone, I am spending a lot of time at the bench, with very little to show for my time.

Anyways, the results of my pre-shading of aircraft panels are in, and I dig it! The pictures are crap, I was tired and did not realize just how bad the lighting was, but you can get the general idea. As with all my CVN airwings, I use numerous shades of grey, replicating the vastly varying shades of the supposedly same color that you will see throughout a carrier's aircraft.

I have a self-imposed goal of having the ship and at least some of the airwing done in time for a competition in Rhode Island in November. I am hoping the goal will help me be more productinve, we shall see...

Ryan no matter what you say... This build is magnificent....

Looking good Ryan. I like your idea of pre-shading panels. Pretty cool man. Can't wait to see your aircraft on board.

HI Ryan

great idea that pre-shading panels the pictures do not show off your work ,but we feel that they are there
nice job as always
cheers
Nicolas

Thanks very much guys.

The airwing has been weathered, and decaling has commenced. I weathered this airwing a little heavier than normal, as this was a long and extended combat cruise, so the ship and planes took a beating.

The decals are from starfighter, and while they are good, they are not quite great, a little under par for what I am used to from starfighter I think. There are a few omissions in markings that would prove to be a problem if I were building the entire ariwing, but since I am not using all the decals, I can source what I need from others left on the sheets. I have run into a couple spots on the high-viz sheet where there was no white ink undercoating the colored section, resulting in a translucent color instead of the solid vivid colors I am used to.

I actually timed myself on decaling one of the hornets. With trimming the clear film off of each decal, then cutting them out and applying them, it took me 18 minutes to do one bird. Now I realize why sometimes it seems I get so little done at the bench. That means that the airwing I did on Reagan took nearly 24 hours just with decals!

I like those planes a lot. Your work in the F-18,s is superb.

Congratulations

Thanks Jaguar!

Decaling of the airwing is almost complete. I have continued to find several issues with the hi-viz decals for these planes, one of the E-2 stars and bars markings have no white ink on them, and the red markings have stripes of color void in them. I have never experienced these issues with starfighter (or any other brands) of decals before, so hopefully this is just a fluke. I did contact starfighter about it, the response I got was somewhat blas� and defensive, so I guess I will just drop it and move on.

In this scale, I find that painting perfectly straight de-icing lines on the E-2s and C-2s to be nearly impossible, so I now use spare black decaling stripes to ensure straight lines, looks much sharper.

The aircraft are rounding into form nicely. Hell, I can't get my 48th scale aircraft to look that good.

WOW...
Those are some sweet planes..

Ryan,
I got the same color void striping that you have, albeit it was only on one set. Just shrugged my shoulders and moved on since it wasn't terribly noticeable.

Airwing's looking great btw

Fantastic work sgtryan13
...congratulation

Hey there MR. Newport News Shipbuilding Co. in one person!


I sure am glad to see the progress of your build!!! Looks like it's airwing time for everyone! Keep it up, they are coming along nicely! How many aircraft in total?

Cheers: Laci

Thanks Guys! Laci, if I recall correctly, there will be 35 aircraft on deck for this one.

I am still clawing my way out of my modeling funk, it is getting a little better, but I am still nowhere near getting my full mojo back yet. To try to snap me out of it, I shifted gears and did a quick build of the Colonial One from the Battlestar Galactica series. I flew through it in a couple of days, not being the normal perfectionist that I am, leaving lots of warts, but it felt good to have a finished product.

The airwing has been getting all of my attention. One area I have never been completely happy with on my AC is the landing gear doors. I stopped using PE gear doors, as I have found that the bond of the glue on such a small surface does not stand up well to the rigors of the model being moved from show to show, or delivered to a customer. So for the past few carriers, I scratchbuilt gear doors from styrene. It has a much stronger bond, but the downside is that even the thinnest styrene is still overscale in it's thickness. Well, I finally had a stroke of genius that should have hit me several builds ago, and I scratchbuilt the gear doors out of plain old PAPER. Super simple, yet super effective, plus it has the added bonus of not having to trim and sand all the PE fret attachment points.

If anyone cares to see more shots of the Colonial One, she is on this page: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=35708&start=180

The paper is a brilliant idea! I shall have to try it out. You could even use a printer to print out some detail on the inside of the doors.

~Greg

Greg, I never even thought of that, not a bad idea. Though I think it would add a lot more intricacy to the work, as you would have to be even more careful and mindful of the positioning and cutting of the paper, I'll keep it simple for the time being.

All of the hornets now have their gear doors, these were the most time consuming, as each has 9 friggin doors added to them! The airwing also started getting armed up, the missiles are from shapeways and required a ton of cleanup, and the bombs are from GHQ, also requiring a lot of work to clean them up.

The tomcats and Vikings got their scratch built interiors. these look overly simplified, but I find that they are actually better and more visible through a closed cockpit than the PE interiors, so this is how I do it.

The other big doin's at my workshop is that it got a major cleaning, reorganizing and entertainment upgrade. Weather this results in an increase in production is yet to be seen, but I am enjoying how clean and organized it is at the moment, and it has actually stayed more or less this clean for 2 weeks now.

I oddly get a big kick out of cleaning up my work area. Admittedly my space is much smaller than yours, and too much clutter means I can't work at all, but there's something inspiring about a spotless work space, for how ever long it lasts.

Ryan, I don't even think about cleaning mine.