Titan IV (USAF)

Photo of the subject rocket 

I''m embarrassed to even document the current stage of this project, but I'm doing it in the hopes it will motivate me to salvage the kit. I pulled this out of storage in progress by a younger and less patient version of myself. I wasn't impressed with the quality of the kit, so I remember giving up and just trying to finish it. In my haste, I made it bad enough I just didn't want to display it. My plan is to strip, sand, and re-etch this to at least the point of being a "looks good from 3 feet away" kit. 

This kit from Realspace had some serious issues. The panel lines separating the segments were very crooked, uneven width and depth. I initially tried to file them out, but that only made them look worse. I'm now going the route of filling them with putty, and I will apply black stripe decals in their place after I sand them smooth. 

Sanded everything smooth as I could and primed with Mr. Surfacer 1000. This revealed a few more problem areas. Some I will fix with putty. The rest I plan to fix with some relatively thick decal bands. 

Using Dymo labeling tape to try to get the putty in a somewhat straight line on this assembly. 

I believe I may go crawl under a rock now... obviously the Tamiya paint did not react well with the primer. I must have put too much on and it saturated through.  

I used oven cleaner to strip the primer and paint off the assembly. Hopefully it also stripped the curse that seems to be on this project! 

Resuming my crimes against model rocketry... that's a lot of green putty.  

Filled, sanded, and polished. Looks kind of ugly now, but looking forward to adding a nice coat of surfacing primer! 

Primed the areas that will get a white overcoat. Will prime the metallic areas black after this dries. 

First coat of white revealed a few more flaws. I applied some more putty... more waiting! 

I decided this would be the last round of priming and finding flaws on this kit. There will always be flaws on this one... so it will go on a shelf that will be difficult for people to inspect closely! Started in with the preliminary painting and masking of the main rocket body. 

More painting... debating how to handle decals. I'm thinking it may be better to apply tape stripes instead, to cover imperfections in the resin booster segments. 

The cursed project continues. I used 1/16" art tape on the booster rockets. It isn't as straight as I had hoped, but painting the segments was even less desirable due to the even more crooked resin moldings. Used a combination of aluminum paint and foil to do the metal parts of the main rocket... and spilled the paint. My luck is improving though, I only got it on the floor and some of my tools rather than the rocket. I don't want to paint this thing again! 

I hope the superglue holding this together is super! The main rocket is rather top heavy with a solid resin shroud atop a hollow styrene tube. There are some photoetch braces I have yet to install, but unlike the real thing, I don't think they will do much for structural integrity! 

Thankful I had some white decal stripes from Fantasy Printshop. The resin casting was really crooked and uneven depth. The decals covered up a lot of that. 

Attached the rocket to a base and applied decals. Only need to attach a few parts and do some detail painting now. 

I'm calling this one done and putting it on a high shelf to make it unavailable for close inspection! Not my best work, nor was this a good kit. But I feel good getting it off the shelf of doom.