I finished off the Viper build last Thursday. She competed in MosquitoCon 21 on Saturday and took a Second Place trophy in her category. Now I’m in the process of trying to figure out how to pack this thing up so that it’ll ship to Florida in one piece!
Glad to have this complete. Really happy with how it turned out. Almost sad to have to ship her off.
Photos are HERE.
This will be my final update post on the Colonial Viper MKII. The next photos will be of her completed. But for now, here are a few photos of the weathering process. I’m only going to show the forward avionics bays to illustrate this, as there’s more going on in that section, detail-wise, than in the engines, and because I’m close enough to the end that I don’t want to show overall shots of her until completely finished.
For washes I still like to use artists oils. I have, however, gotten away from using mineral spirits for thinner, and instead I use lighter fluid. It works just as well, but dries much faster. Using lighter fluid (naptha) allows the oils to dry in just a couple of days, instead of taking nearly a week. I did a general wash of the avionics bays, let that dry, and dullcoated everything. I then used acrylic bronze paint for some details, and once that dried I picked out further points of interest using a silver pencil.
The next step is pastel chalk and weathering powders to dirty her up a bit, and some airbrushing of pure flat black for blast marks, engine residue, and gun smoke.
That’s it. The journey is nearly over. Our yearly club show, MosquitoCon, is next Saturday, and the Viper will be on the contest table. After that, she gets packed up and shipped to her new owner.
It’s been nearly a month now since Kristen and I returned from our Hawaiian Honeymoon. We are still in our post-Aloha depression. It gets better day by day, the freakishly-warm weather we’ve had on the East Coast helps a bit, but it’s still taking some adjustment.
I took several hundred photos during the trip, and while I posted quite a few while we were there, there are still too many to post (and almost too many to sort!). I’ve put up a page with a few dozen images that I picked for… well, I picked them for some reason.
We started our trip in Waikiki, because Continue reading
Photos of decals applied (the guns in the shots are crooked as they’re just stuck on to see how they look, they’ll be straight once glued on). I used the kit decals for the smaller markings and the squadron badge. The kit supplies both red stripes with the insignia included, or just the yellow insignia if you want to paint your own stripes. The only problem was that they were so translucent that they didn’t show up at all once applied! Fortunately I also purchased an aftermarket decal sheet to get the tail code number and nameplate for Admiral Adama’s bird during the first Cylon War. Those insignia worked just fine.
I also removed the canopy masks. There’s some cleaning up to do where I built up the paint a little too much, but otherwise it looks good.
Next is weathering, and a final clear coat to hide that visible film around the decals. I have to say that I’m pretty impressed with how this model is turning out. I’ve had my doubts along the way, but she’s coming together very nicely!
First Viper in-progress post in a while. Two weeks in Hawaii and the subsequent jet lag cut way down on building time. Also, I’m nearing the end of the project, and that’s another time when things seem to slow down. Last minute tweaks, touch-ups, details, etc, all add very little to the overall bulk of the model, but they take a lot of time and do add those little touches that make a model into a replica.
Only two real photos this update. The first shows the added piping that I’ve done to the engine bays. The top is brass rod, the lower two are braided steel cable. The cables come in a roll and are plastic sheathed, which kind of kills the whole braided look. So I held them over a flame, burned off the sheathing, tacked the ends with superglue so they won’t unravel, and glued them in place. I was going to leave them in natural metal, but the more I look at it the more I think I’ll be painting these details.
The guns were a lot of work for one-piece fixtures. There were seams around the entire assembly, and anytime you have to sand anything rounded and with a lot of detail, it takes a lot of effort. I believe I spent three evenings of work just to get these things looking right.
Up next: Decals. This weekend.
In a state-of-the-art museum and conservation lab in Newport News, Virginia, sit large tanks of fresh water that hold large rusting chunks of iron that are over 150 years old. 150 years isn’t a long time for some museum artifacts; in Manhattan one can visit the Metropolitan Museum and see Buddhist statues over 500 years old, then walk several yards down the hall and see mummies thousands of years old. But the significance of the rusted iron from USS Monitor that rests in The Mariner’s Museum in Virginia isn’t in its age; it’s in the revolution that it brought.
The battle between USS Monitor and CSS Virginia 150 years ago today is one of the few naval battles, Continue reading
I wouldn’t say being in Hawaii particularly reminded me of my Navy days, but there were triggers, prompts to my memory of how, once upon a time, I sailed in large gray aluminum and steel warships, not unlike those that were stationed nearby at Pearl Harbor. But it wasn’t the proximity of those warships that brought back my Navy days. It was the Fruit Loops.
I hadn’t had them in years, but at the breakfast buffet our first morning in Waikiki, there they were. In one of those tall clear glass cylinders that look like a gumball machine. You turn a knob and out comes the sweet, crispy goodness inside.
As I munched on my cereal and my wife gave me the “really, you’re eating that?” look, I was reminded Continue reading
When one first gets to Hawaii, you automatically ask “Where are the good beaches?” You are told two things: First, they all are good. Second, they all are open to everyone. There’s no such thing as a private beach in Hawaii (those socialists!)
I believe, though, that I have found the local’s secret for keeping the good beaches to themselves: keep them nearly impossible to get to. Sure, anyone can go to a resort and park in a parking lot and walk forty feet or so to crowded white seaside lots. But the true beaches, the ones that locals love and covet, are harder to come by. If you ask about a specific location and the response is that it’s a “little difficult” to get to, then that’s where you want to go.
Last Friday we went to Makalawana beach Continue reading
I went through the process of masking everything again and shooting the new shade of red. A few photos of that masking and painting process. I did the masking with Tamiya tape completely this time, choosing to not use the vinyl masks due to the problems I had with them on the first pass.
There was a little overspray here and there, but nothing major. I’ve already polished most of it out with rubbing compound (using sandpaper on the red/white combination causes the red paint to stain the white, but the compound does not have this problem. Who know why…).
Finally, I’ve started the plumbing of the engines. I’m using brass wire, which I’ll leave mostly unpainted. They’ll be weathered to blend in with their surroundings, but I like the natural metal look. I’ve also primed the guns and am ready to paint them after a little more cleanup. Once the piping is done, the guns are mounted, I need to do decals and paint the canopy frames, and she’ll be done!
“If you spend two weeks trying to convince yourself that something is correct, then it probably isn’t.” I’m not sure if anyone has ever said that (if not, then (C) Devin Poore, 2012!) but it’s appropriate for my recent experience with the Viper. I kept telling myself that the shade of red mentioned in the last post was fine, that I’d be able to tweak it with clear coats, glazes, and weathering, but the truth was that I just couldn’t take that next step to mask off and paint the rest of the stripes.
So I did some testing. The two photos below are of a sheet of styrene that I used for swatches. I made this up months ago to test paints for an X-Wing paint job (hence the scribing and added bits of styrene detail), but it worked well for this purpose. I painted four shades of red on the test sheet, and compared them to photos online, and to what I think looks right. The first photo is of all four stripes. The second photo has the current red that I used on the left, and the new Insignia Red stripe on the right. It’s not a huge difference, but it’s there: the Insignia Red is just a tad darker, and more importantly, it has more of a blue hue to it than the original color. This is what I’ve sought.
I’ve started prepping the Viper for repainting (first photo in this post). Fortunately this doesn’t require a stripping of any paint. I wet-sanded the borders of the existing stripes so there is no raised buildup that will show after the new red is laid in. I went over the chipped paint areas with more white, very thinned, very low airbrush pressure, to give me more wiggle-room when re-applying the salt chips. I’ll let the white dry for most of the day, and then start the masking again.