Airfix 1:72 Harrier GR9

[Airborne01]

What's not to love about Harriers (apart from the ugly extended nose)! ... Nice job, and welcome!)
Steve

 

[Ed Sunder]

it ripped the wing clean off the plane

Good grief! I know there are a number of missiles that have used umbilicals over the years. It's a bad day when your wing comes off...

What's not to love about Harriers (apart from the ugly extended nose)!

I agree. The proportions for the GR1 just look right. I understand why they lengthened the nose, but the original still looks the best...

 

[Ed Sunder]

A bit more progress on the front landing gear. I added a bit of wire to dress it up:

And here it is clean:

And with the wheel and dirtied up a bit:


I'll be working on painting this weekend and hope to have further progress soon.

 

[Mini Me]

Very nice.

 

[Ed Sunder]

I started with a bit of preshading:

And then painted the lightest shade - used on the wings and a few other places:

And after letting it dry I did some masking:

And then I painted the second color, primarily used on the sides and fuselage underside. After that, I masked off further for the third color, which is the final main color.

And here it is, unmasked:


I have a little cleanup to do - a couple minor masking misses and one area where the tape peeled a bit of paint. I also need to re-mask and paint the area around the intakes - I wasn't going to be able to do that as the same time as the main paint scheme.

Once that's done, I have a conundrum. The front of the wings and the horizontal stabilizers have a tan/yellow stripe on the front and I'm not sure if I should mask and spray or hand paint it. It'll be a challenge either way, specifically on the wings. The part that sticks out (not sure what it's called) that attaches to the second pylon makes it a bit challenging, but I think I can figure it out - I may just have to touch that up after doing the stripe. Well, overall I'm pretty happy with it. I feel like it's really coming alive.

 

[JR]

Ed nice work on the Harrier and the black art of printing in resin .
We were lucky enough to have Harriers based locally until they retired .

 

[Ed Sunder]

Wow! That second photo almost looks fake - I've never seen a batch that large before. Cool!

 

[Jakko]

I thought you were posting greyscale photos there, until I got to the one with the masking tape on

 

[stillp]

Could you use a decal for the stripe Ed?
Pete

 

[Ed Sunder]

I thought you were posting greyscale photos there, until I got to the one with the masking tape on

Lots of gray on this one so far - though some of my detail painting this morning added some color...

Could you use a decal for the stripe Ed?
Pete

I could, but I think I'd rather paint it. A decal would have to curve around the wing front and it's a pretty sharp curve. Not sure I have enough Micro Sol for that.

So after further masking and spraying and then some detail painting, here's where I'm at:




Next up is leading edges, clear-coating, landing gear (and other fiddly bits) and decals. I'm leaving clear parts for the end.

I also brush painted the nose because it would have been quite hard to mask, but the paint is a bit thicker than I'd like. Not sure if I can just sand the paint down, but we'll see. It's not terrible.

 

[Ed Sunder]

I decided to mask the top of the wing and hand paint the bottom (who looks at the bottom?) and completely mask off the tail. The weapons pylons made masking the bottom more time consuming than I would like... Note - if you build this model, paint the wing edges before painting the wings and then mask them off for the rest of the painting - it'll be much easier.



In about an hour I'm going to clear-coat it. Between clear coating the bottom and then the top and waiting for things to dry, it'll be tomorrow at soonest before I'm back on this thing.

 

[Mini Me]

Getting closer.

 

[Mickc1440]

Really nice looking model

 

[JR]

Some fine work Ed.

 

[Tim Marlow]

Lovely work going on here.

 

[adt70hk]

Great work!!

Very well done!!

Andrew

 

[Ed Sunder]

I've started attaching the gear, gear doors etc. and I've found that the main gear is about 0.5mm or so off the deck, with the other gear attached. It's possible I don't have the wing gear down far enough, but I think it's correct. Anyway, that ship has sailed. So I need to push the gear a bit lower. So I made a little shim out of styrene. Here is that shim, along with the gear:


And here is the hole where it'll go:


And here it is glued in place:


Once that dries I'll paint it and put the gear in, along with the rest of the doors. Incidentally, I'm not sure what it is about my phone camera, but I promise you the finish doesn't look like that. It's quite smooth. Of course, these are magnified a ton... Anyway, that's about as far as I'm likely to get today.

I started this build as a, "Hey I'm going to try to build something in a week to get my model mojo back!" project, but then when I got into it I liked where it was going and tried to make it a lot better. As a result I wasn't super concerned with seams and such initially. You can see the area around the lower flap door has some sort of dent where the flap attaches. If I were to build another one of these, there are a lot of things I'd do differently. Ah well...

 

[Jakko]

Incidentally, I'm not sure what it is about my phone camera, but I promise you the finish doesn't look like that. It's quite smooth.

Cameras are too good these days … Photograph anything up close and it’ll look a lot worse than it does in real life

 

[Tim Marlow]

Cameras are too good these days … Photograph anything up close and it’ll look a lot worse than it does in real life

Some of it is the photo enhancement algorithm the camera applies post shot as well. They “sharpen” the image, which can make flaws much more noticeable, and they saturate colours, which can make the different coloured areas stand out from each other…..

 

[Ed Sunder]

Some of it is the photo enhancement algorithm the camera applies post shot as well.

I have a Pixel 4 phone, which does a lot of enhancement. Normally, that's fantastic, but for these purposes, maybe not as much.