Wings
One of my dreaded tasks is installing the wings. Glueing them on is the easy part. It’s fixing those horrible gaps is what I dread. One of those pesky joints Kitty Hawk put on this kit is having a butt joint on the underside wing panels. They did the same thing on the fin! This seems to be standard practice for them because they do the same thing on their SU-35 kit. Come on Kitty Hawk, there is no need to put this kind of joint on a kit!
(Photos: At the top left, we can see the gap that has to be fixed at the wing joint. At bottom right is the dreadful butt joint on the wing panel.
The gaps have been filled with cyano glue and putty. Panel lines and rivets are prescribed. A coat of grey primer and wash is applied to check for areas that need more work.).
The wing to fuselage joint is nasty at both top and bottom.
I sprayed on a coat of grey primer made from a thinned down Mr Surfacer 1000 to check the model joints. Then I applied the Tamiya wash on the panel lines to check if all the panel lines and rivets will show up in subsequent washes. In typical KH fashion, most of the rivets and rivet lines on curved surfaces are either too shallow or don’t show up at all. I spent some time and re-scribed and restored rivets in these areas.
(Photo: Edges of the windshield had to be scraped down to blend it to the surface of the fuselage).
Painting
The kit provided markings for three Jaguars, all very colourful in their ways. I had a hard time deciding between the standard grey/green and the winter camo. After much back and forth, I finally decided on selecting the GR3 from 54 Sqn in winter camo.
Due to the light colour of this aircraft, I pre-shaded some of the panel lines to start the painting process. Then, a mix of off-white (white mixed with a bit of black) is applied to the white area of the camouflage. For the medium grey, I used Tamiya XF-83 (Medium Gray 2) with about 5% by volume of black added to make it darker.
To create a slightly worn and dirtied look, I post-shaded the white area with the same Medium Gray on the panel lines, rivets and on walk-able areas of the aircraft. Then, I go over the shaded area with thin out mix of the Off-White sprayed in a mottling pattern to create a random look. The same technique is repeated on the Medium Gray area of the camouflage.
The decals are very thin and delicate, and prone to breakage when moving a decal into position. Decal markings are printed off register with an offset white boarder showing up on all markings. This is very disappointing, but the bright spot is that the decals set well with Microset solution. The most difficult decal to apply is the checkers on the tail rear warning receiver (RWR). This decal is oversized and careful trimming with a new-sharp X-Acto blade is required after the decal has been softened and wraps around the contour of the RWR fairing.
After decaling, I sprayed two coats of Pledge floor wax to protect the paint and decal from the panel wash. For the panel wash, I used the Tamiya Grey enamel panel line accent colour. Photos of this aircraft show that the lower part of the fuselage aft of the APU is heavily stained with oil from the APU. I replicated that with a streak wash using Tamiya Brown panel line accent colour. Then I sprayed this accent colour in areas to blend it all in. Finally, the entire model is sprayed with Vallejo Matt Acrylic Varnish.
To finish off the project, I created some RAF’s Removed Before Flight (RBF) flags by printing the image of the flags on paper using my Ink-Jet printer. I created two FOD covers to cover the intakes. I somehow lost the long nose pitot tube and so I made a new one from brass tubing and wire. Normally, this long tube is covered over with a red cover and RBF when the aircraft is on the ground to make this part of the aircraft noticeable and protect the tube. It would be a really bad day if someone didn’t see this long tube sticking out and smack into it.
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