B-Wing

This kit builds really quickly. After an hour or two, I had these main assemblies already, including partially painting the cockpit (in grey with shading and highlighting, which you can’t really tell from the photo 🙂). 

I intended to keep the fuselage halves separate until I had finished the cockpit, but it turns out you can fit the cockpit after joining the halves, so I glued them together already. 

And the main wing on too. This was a mistake, though, because it turns out the hinges for the smaller, folding wings can’t be installed when the big wing is already on (the instructions have you fit the folding wings first, but I thought I knew better) so I had to take it back off to fit the hinges, then re-fit the big wing. 

The folding wings are on as well, but again: you should fit them before the big, fixed wing. The last hinge part has a lug that must be trapped between the halves of the big wing, but I had to cut the lug off to allow it to fit. None of this is a real problem if you build the model without glue, of course, but I did glue everything that I don’t want to be moveable. 

Model complete, other than two bits that can only be installed after putting the cockpit interior into the outer shell, which will have to wait until after painting. This took all of two evenings, though the cockpit and pilot aren’t completely painted yet. 

And taken apart into its subassemblies so I can paint it. The cockpit will stay loose so it can rotate, the wings can still fold, and I will leave the engine section loose too so I can fit a light later, if I ever fancy doing so. 

I forgot to take a photo after spraying the model Tamiya XF-80 Royal Light Gray, so here it is with masking tape on for the blue-grey. If you’re building this kit too and use glue, learn from my mistakes: leave certain bits loose so you can paint them without masking 🙂 

The blue-grey is a mixture of Tamiya XF-18 Medium Blue and Tamiya XF-80 Royal Light Gray, probably about 1:1 but I just added one to the other until it looked good to me. The engine nozzles and base are XF-24 Dark Grey (the lighter base is there to show the colour of the plastic before I painted it, else you might think there’s no paint on those at all 🙂). 

With the base colours on, I added an all-over wash of thinned Army Painter Strong Tone (about 1:1 to 2:1 water-to-paint) to shade it. Once that was dry, I drybrushed the whole model with lighter versions of the colours under the wash, two or three shades of each, getting lighter each time. 

The engines were given a wash of Army Painter Dark Tone, unthinned, and then drybrushed with dark and medium grey. The silver is Vallejo Model Air Aluminium, which is airbrush paint that I applied with a brush. 

After completing the cockpit and adding the decals, the model is done. 

 

 

The cockpit rotates, though not very smoothly even though I smeared vaseline around the part that it actually turns around. 

The wings also fold, but some paint has rubbed off on the hinge, so I’ll probably display it with the wings folded out 🙂