Thursday, January 17, 2013

Building the Valkyrie WIP#2 - Cockpit

Work continues on the Valk...













I made quite a bit of progress this week and it's all starting to take shape.

The cockpit and nose section

I knew I had to paint the crew and cockpit sections before I assembled them into the nose of the kit.  If I had built it all and then tried to paint everything it would be way too inaccessible to do a decent job.  In the end there's still a fair amount of work to do before I'm happy but the difficult to reach bits are done.

The actual assembly of the nose and cockpit is a bit fiddly and the fit isn't great but it's all hanging together quite well I think.






























Tail boom and (sliding) doors

Again, thinking ahead, I wanted to be able to open and close the side doors.  That meant I had to paint up the interior faces of the doors before assembly.  This part was relatively straightforward and in contrast to the nose, the tail boom fit was pretty good.  I was also pleased to find that the tail gives a lot of structural strength to the model, which is handy when you have a removable roof...


























































Next steps

All the major gluing and assembly is now finished, so I'm ready to move on to the 'funnest' bit, priming and painting.  I'll be painting the wings, weapons, landing gear and canopy separately from the main body for my own sanity.

The colour scheme I'll be going for is a two-tone dark grey upper body contrasting with a white underbelly and I'll try and have that done in the next couple of days.

In the meantime let me know your thoughts, questions and comments.

If you'd like to read the 1st part of this WIP go to Building the Valkyrie WIP#1 - Interior. For WIP#3 click here


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4 comments:

  1. Beautiful work so far, mate! I love the thought you're putting into the assembly stage, that will pay off in spades in the end!

    Looking forward to seeing more!

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  2. I like the color scheme on the pilots. What shades of green did you use? Also, with the doors on, that interior is really starting to take shape. Are you attaching the pintle-mounted heavy bolters inside the doors?

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  3. Hi Gary, I used 2 different greens both from Vallejo, Russian Uniform for the arms and legs and German Fieldgrey for the helmet and body. The jury is still out on the bolters... but I'm leaning towards the idea to add that visual interest to the cabin interior.

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