I normally stick to
anything with a gas turbine engine in it but the Lightning is the coolest WWII
plane in my opinion. So I thought I'd take a break from jets and painting planes
gray and do the Lightning with my first NMF. I have to say that at first I
really did not enjoy building this model much. I had a lot of fit issues and of
course the more sanding the more scribing and putting rivet detail back! Then of
course there's the weight issue. This thing takes 60g to not sit on it's tail.
So forget displaying the gun bay open. I had weight jammed into both engines and
the gun bay and the nose! It just balances forward. Crazy. There were some bad
fit issues here and there, but slowly I worked through them. I almost binned
this model a few times, but for the money it cost I'm way to cheap!
Click on
images below to see larger images
I built his model
completely OOB. I didn't even bother to do any additional detail. I hoped
that it wouldn't matter if I pulled off the NMF I had in mind for it. This
was the first time I'd done that and I really thought about all my
options. Foiling was considered but Alclad2 won out in the end. I sprayed
a coat of Krylon black gloss paint for my undercoat and then used polished
aluminum, white and dark aluminum and a touch of stainless steel. The
black is Tamiya flat black. I used the kit decals which were a little
sparse but went on ok. I wanted it to look like a museum piece so that's
what I used for my reference pictures.
There were a few
firsts for me here and there was definitely a learning curve with the Alclad.
Lessons like that white aluminum has extremely poor adhesion to polished. There
was some lifting.... and some crying. But I got through and honestly I couldn't
be happier with the results. Thanks for looking!!
Niall Cairns
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