EE Lightning F.2A WIP#2

I am slowly getting there. Finally the decals on the fuselage were finished last night and now I am giving the Lightning a few coats of clear to seal them. The silver areas underneath are having some gloss clear over them whilst the green will be receiving a couple of satin coats. Next the undercarriage bays will be painted with some Aluminium paint along with the gear, air-brake openings, wheels and inner surfaces of the doors. If I am lucky, this bird might be finished for next weekend and then I can get back to working on the Diamond T and finish the write up on that project for the magazine. 

So, back to clearing this model and painting the undercarriage, etc.

EE Lightning F.2A WIP#1

I think most aircraft model makers have a love of certain aircraft, well I do. These aircraft for me are the P-51 Mustang's, EE Canberra's, Spitfire's and EE Lightnings. In my stockpile of kits, I have several examples of these aircraft in a few different scales.

This project is the recent tooled Airfix 1/72nd scale Lightning F.2A, which is a lovely kit to build (so far). This has gone together without any major problems, the only one I have had with it is the fitting of the air intake into the fuselage nose. The intake needed a little sanding to be done so it would sit inside the nose without it pushing the fuselage halves apart. A few other parts needed a little sanding down to get a better fitment, but this will be found on a lot of kits, no matter what the age of the tooling.

I lacked to take any photos of the building proceed prior to these one, I just blame it on getting back into the swing of things after the house move and still doing the finishing touches to my new modelling room. Plus my modelling mojo is not full back on form yet to.

So, the story so far on the Lightning. The fuselage has been built up to painting stage with the pilot's seat left out until final assembly. Originally, I was going to us Alclad paints for the metal finish on the lower half of the fuselage, but decided to go with Mr Hobby's Silver instead. The green is Xtracrylix XA1001 RAF Dark Green then the model had a couple of coats of Johnsons Klear in preparation for the decals. This is the stage I am at now, adding the decals, which there is quite a few when you include the stencils that went on these aircraft. So that's where I am now with this project and I will update as it proceeds.

Happy New Year

A belated Happy New Year to all of my blog followers.

Life is slowly getting back to normal, well, if you can call it normal. Our new home is almost to how we want everything in it. There is just a few things left to sort out like the spare bedroom and the garage. The loft need to have a few shelves added between the rafters to store some light boxes on and clear the floor space. Once that is done, we can finish clearing the spare room and get some furniture for in there.

Now, my workshop. That is almost there, just a few more things to sort out in it to get it to how I want it. I go myself a new spray booth, a proper one not the homemade I use to have. Storage space is a definite problem in here, I would have never of thought this, but I actually do miss my old workshop. I changed the main lights in here today, fitted a three way halogen setup but using some white light LED's in it instead of the normal halogen bulbs supplied. Firstly, these are cheaper to use and secondly they do not give off the heat of normal halogens.

Onto the modelling. Whilst things have been upside down from the move, I decided to build a 1/144th scale Tomcat from Dragon which I got at the Letchworth show just before the move. It was just something that was easy to get at and to take to work with me for now. All that the Tomcat needs now is for the missiles and external tanks to be painted and fitted to finish it off. I have also dug out the Airfix Lightning F.2A which I started a few months before the move. For Airfix's new tooling, I found that the fuselage had a few alignment issues along the underside. This needed a little filling and rescribing to rectify this. The air intake also needed some sanding to get this to fit inside the nose properly to. Now I am on to the wing assembly and the first one seems to have gone together without any problems so far. I will start a WIP progress posting of this one soon.

One of my aims for the start of the year is top get some of the older part finished projects done before starting on any new major builds. Now we are here in the new house, it would be nice to build some of my larger kits like the 1/24th Typhoon or the 1/32nd SWS Mustang. But with several unfinished projects on the shelf next to me, is a reminder that I have to clear some of these first. So the Lightning is first on the list and the Diamond T review build also has to be done to. Now, just finish setting up the workshop and then crack on with some serious modelling.

New Workshop Coming Together

We have been in our new house for almost three weeks and things are slowly coming together as to various items finding their new homes. The rest of the house has taken priority over my hobby room, but I have been setting it up in between other jobs around the house which cannot be done in the evenings. 

Space has been an issue from the start, I did not realise the room was this small from when we viewed the house back in July. Storage of my stockpile of kits was going to be the biggest problem, of which some will go into the old wardrobe that was in our Kyran's bedroom. But this would only have the capacity to hold only part of my stockpile, the rest would need to be kept in the loft for now. My old desk has also gone and I am now using the old computer desk we had in the old house as the previous owners of the house had left their desk which Kyran quickly took pocession of on the day we moved in. So I had the desk we were going to give to him. I have swapped the black plastic shelf unit with the smaller grey one and taken the old large bookshelf from the computer room to. 

Gradually, the workshop has grown to the state that will be seen in the accompanying photos, but there is still some work to be done to finish it off. I need to make some shelves to go into the wardrobe for stacking the kit boxes on, plus I need to store some toolboxes at the bottom of it to. My display cabinet I use to have above the stairs in the old house needs to be fixed to the wall. There are still some boxes that need to be unpacked and anything which is no longer required, either binned or sold/given to someone else who could use it. The time I think has also arrived to either sell or pack away some of my earlier builds to make room for some newer ones. But what do I get rid of? It is hard to decide! 

So, a couple more weeks and I think I will be in the position to get back to some serious modelling and finish off some old outstanding projects. 

Goodbye Luton, hello Hemsworth

It has been a few weeks since I last posted on here, this was down to the family upping our roots and moving Northwards to West Yorkshire. We have now been here for two weeks now and we are slowly getting the new house sorted out.  Things have progressed to the stage where I have now started to set up my new modelling room.  One thing, it is smaller than my old room in the old house, but this was in the converted loft space giving me plenty of room to work on and display the built models. Best of all was the storage area for hiding my stockpile of kits. This might have to be writtled down a little bit now. 

Last week, I popped down to meet the local IPMS branch for Barnsley. I was made very welcome by all of them and we had a good laugh. I think I will enjoy myself with this bunch and hopefully a start of visiting some new shows. One thing I can say about this area is that we have been made welcome by everyone we have met and everybody is so friendly around here. 

Once I have got the new model room sorted out, I will post a couple of photos of it on here and then get back to some model building very soon. So, watch this space.