1/48 Lockheed TR-1A

My latest completion, finished just a few hours ago is the TR-1A USAF spy plane, in 1/48 scale from Italeri. 
 
I started this in early December, while I was still finishing off another model. I still managed to complete this in a good time rate for me lately, especially considering the amount of work I had to put into this before painting. 
The model has raised panel lines. I decided to re-scribe all of these. A big undertaking for a model with a greater than 65cm wing span. That's a lot of real estate to re-scribe. I did this on the sprue tree, and built the model after completion of that work. Only then did I find when I started putting it all together how much I would need to fill every join. No wait, that's a problem for later, let's start in the cockpit. Boring details, not a lot interest in there, but at least I can close the canopy on it all. The fit was less than good, little in the way of guidance at times for locating things, eg like the pilot seat. I left it out until the end so I could better guess where it should be. There is no dash board behind the ugly instrument panel, and it would look terrible without something, so I hacked up the spare pilot seat, and used that for a dash board. 
Assembling things further, I decided filler wasn't up to the task, so I used superglue on all the gaps. This made a nice smooth finish in the end, but a lot of work in this summer heat to sand it all back to smooth. I then had to redo a lot of my panel lines. lol
The canopy has a series of complex curves not aligned with a panel frame, so that was fun to mask, but I managed it, so I'm pleased with that. 
Painting this big beast started with Mr Surfacer 1500 black primer. I then did a marbling type effect using tamiya light grey panel liner all over.
 
When that was done, I blended it all with Tamiya Rubber Black LP65. From here I was pretty happy, and decals were put on. They were unfortunately trash. Very thick, very shiny, and bright red. They looked terrible on a faded black finish.
 
So I sprayed these with heavily thinned LP65. I tried an SMS flat clear varnish next, it went really bad, maybe I've got a bad bottle. It came out of the airbrush very dry and dusty, spitting white dusty spots on the model. I had to work with it though, so I started to work the result of that into the faded and finished paint work of a TR-1A. To hide the varnish finish I made a black oil paint wash, and spread that all over, and once dry I rubbed this off again. I followed up this with a panel line wash from Ammo called Stone Grey for black PLW. Just into my rescribed panel lines on the top surfaces though, and I rubbed the excess away spreading and fading it in the top panels themselves. 
Finally in the last couple of days it was time to paint the small bits like landing gear, and fit this all to the model. And it's done. I missed one last job I had to do before taking the photos, I needed to trim the excess from the back of one of the tail decals. That's been done since the photos were taken, and I don't feel the need to redo these photos. They will do! I'm done!
Cheers for reading this far! Happy to answer any questions. 
Final pics of the TR1A:
 

 

 

 

 


Alister

Stunning. Love it mate, love the not black.

Thank you Gary! The "black not black" was a lot of fun to work on. In the end I just kept throwing more and more at it, to see what worked and what didn't.

Excellent job on this, really impressed on how well the black looks. 
I may have to use your technique on my F-117 build.

WOW, she’s a big girl!!! That wingspan is just awesome. I too, love the paint job… and am in awe of what all that scribing must have been like. I’ve yet to try the super glue trick, instead of putty.

Did you have to weight the nose at all? 

thanks guys! Glad you like it. Indeed, this sort of finish would go great with a F117 or SR71 (speaking of which, I need one of each of those lol)

Cheers Em, the scribing did take a while, but I did a bit here for an hour, walked away, came back the next day, did 30 minutes, next day, did an hour, and before I knew it I had climbed enough steps to reach the top of that mountain lol..
No nose weight required. It's didn't even cross my mind until you mentioned it to even put one in, so I'm glad it didn't!