Tornado F6

[PR19_Kit]

I've had better ideas than filling in the RB199 exhausts with putty.

They're now on the third PSR session with at least two more to go by the look of it. At least the summery weather makes the Presto go off faster, one saving grace anyway.

[PR19_Kit]

I think I've sorted a squadron and scheme for the F6, but I'll have to do all the decals myself, which isn't unusual but I've not done any for a Tonka before.

It'll be 256 Sqdn. which disbanded for good in 1958 after flying Meteor NF14s, but their colours were a pale and medium blue, which could go well on some swoopy stripes running down the fin and along the fuselage.

The PSR on the exhausts continues, but I think I'm almost there now.

[PR19_Kit]

My Putty Wu has surely been in the ascendent over the last few days as I've re-modelled the entire rear end of the F6 with only umpteen PSR sessions and just a couple of tiny pieces of scrap styrene.

Here's the updated tail of the F6 showing the new EJ200 exhausts, no sign of the underlying RB199 exhausts, and the new tail chute fairing.



Now it's onto the rather smart resin bang seats, and they'll need some painting before mucho PE and resin bits being attached.

[Gondor]

That looks good Kit 

Gondor

[DogfighterZen]

Looking good indeed! 

[PR19_Kit]

The Italeri bang seats in the F3 kit are pretty basic, but not bad, but I saw that the Big H had a sale on some months ago of Eduard Brassin stuff, and one those items was some Tornado bang seats, so I got some. They're resin moulded, beautifully, with a zillion etched bits to glue in place after the seats have been painted.

Each seat has EIGHT PE bits to glue on! Some of them are only 2 mm x 2 mm and I'm supposed to fold them in half! 

I've got the major PE bits in place, the belts etc, but the rest can go hang, they'll be deep in the cockpit and no-one will look that deep I'm sure. The bits are 1/72 scale, but I'm afraid my fingers are 1/1 scale!

This is as far as they're going.

[PR19_Kit]

I'm not sure the expense or the effort of building those seats was worth it now.

You can hardly see any of the 'super detail' with the canopy in place, even a canopy as big as that!

[Gondor]

Sometimes companies think that part counts matter.

Gondor

[scooter]

And that's why I usually didn't bother painting the cockpit parts and painted the canopy black.

[NARSES2]

Must admit I don't spend to much times on cockpits unless the canopy can be shown open, and even then you end up not seeing half the detail, especially on WWII and earlier types. 

But you know it's there Kit

[PR19_Kit]

But you know it's there Kit

Sure, but after all the aggro getting it in there I'm not sure I WANT to know.

It's the same with the Spitfire PRXI(T), the cockpit(s) are really what the whiff is all about, and it's a pain getting it to work properly, but the canopies are so small that you can't actually see  what I had to do to get it to look right.   

[PR19_Kit]

Here's the armament loads for the F6, the rather neat looking 'crate' of AIM-120 Slammers, which need their nose cones gluing on before painting them. Not sure why they couldn't print them all in one piece, but I know NOTHING about 3D printing.



And then the AMRAAMs for the wing mounted fuel tank pylons. A triumph of extraneous packaging over sense to my mind!

[PR19_Kit]

I chopped out the AMRAAMs from their cage, and what a job that was, and also got the nose cones out too. For some they're separate parts which have to be glued onto the main missile body, and that's fiddly too. Tornados carry their long range missiles, Skyflashes or Slammers, semi-recessed under the belly so for our models we don't need the top set of fins on the missiles, so I duly set off to cut the top fins off the Slammers.

With them being made in resin it ought to have just been a matter of snapping them off with a pair of needle nose pliers, and so it was for three of them. But the third one just snapped clean in half, one half vanishing off into the distance at around M 3.0. 

I looked and looked but nowhere could I find it, so out came the vernier calipers to see if I could 'convert' a Skyflash into a Slammer. They're almost excatly the same size, in 1/72 anyway, and the fins are in exactly the same place, the Slammer's are just a tad smaller.    So I set to with my scalpel and files and chopped the Skyflash's fins down to size.



The top one is the 'converted' Skyflash, the middle one is the resin Slammer and the bottom one is one of the ASRAAMs already glued onto its pylon.

Good enough for Government work I think. 

[buzzbomb]

The ersatz AMRAAM looks the goods to me without going to the effort of changing the for'ard fins
Give it a B designation in the backstory

[Pellson]

..256 Sqdn. which disbanded for good in 1958 after flying Meteor NF14s, but their colours were a pale and medium blue, which could go well on some swoopy stripes running down the fin and along the fuselage.

Is there somewhere a table or source giving these colours for all applicable RAF sqns?