Special Hobby X-15A-2 1:32

I tried painting and weathering the rear stabilisers as an experiment, but it all went horribly wrong so I soaked the parts in Mr Muscle oven cleaner for a couple of hours and the paint came right off – happily, it didn’t affect the Mr Surfacer primer I’d used underneath. Worth knowing.

Hot bits

I also got on with the exhaust nozzle. This comes pretty much as a single casting, and it came as a relief not to have to do any scratchbuilding on this bit. I did drill out some of the tiny drain tubes though. After some painting and weathering, it looks pretty convincing. Once the back end plate is installed around it with all the dump pipes, it looks suitably menacing

I was quite satisfied with the heat staining on the surrounding panels, which was done with red and blue clear paints via some very careful airbrushing. The dump pipes were very shiny on the real thing, or at least on the real thing in the museum and so I painted them in Alclad Polished Aluminium. I also added a couple of tie straps from thin foil to cover the less than impressive joints between the resin pipes.

I painted the tail parts again, this time with a base of NATO black and a bit of buff sprayed in between the rivet lines to give a bit of a heat lightened look. I decided not to go too over the top with the weathering on this. I’d been looking at the heavily stained X-15A-2 in the museum pictures, and it looks a wreck – not surprising after it was virtually burnt to a crisp in the 4500mph flight and declared unfit to fly again. I was aiming for a point earlier in its life, when it was used, but not too used – sort of medium to well done, if you like…

Then I spent a few hours scratchbuilding details on the nose gear leg. The kit part is just a plain rod with a couple of diameter changes along its length, but the two halves of the mould were misaligned and left a mismatch. It took a bit of cleaning up to make the thing look presentable. Also, there are a few bits and pieces on the front of the gear leg, the lower one appears to be something to do with the up-lock mechanism, the upper one has a cable attached to it, possibly something to do with the gear release. Dunno.

Anyway, here’s the gear leg with the scratchbuilt parts added, a bit of detail painting a black wash, some bare metal foil and a bit of lead wire for the release cable.

Tanking along

I don’t usually like hanging things under my aircraft as I think it spoils the lines in many cases, but I decided to attach the fuel tanks on this build. First, there was some complicated masking and painting going on to get the strange red and white quartered effect, and a thick black stripe.

Then the maze of external fuel lines had to be scratchbuilt. The kit includes some copper wire for these, but I decided I’d be better off making them from 0.5mm styrene rod, which had the advantage of starting life straight rather than the coiled up mess the kit provides. No template is provided for these in the kit, so each one had to be offered up to the tank and bent to suit. On went the lines for the first tank; then it all had to be done again in a different arrangement for the second one. Once that was all sorted, it was off with the hardware again and the tanks got a coat of Klear ready for the 28 decals needed on each one. While that was drying off, the network of pipes got a coat of satin black from a Halfords can, followed by a coat of Alclad2 Polished Aluminium, which then had a black pastel wash applied to it. The pipes were reinstalled on the tank along with various other bits of hardware, some detail painting was done and that was it. After all this effort you now have two slightly (intentionally) dissimilar tanks.

The bad news is that after all that fiddling to get the fuel lines parallel, installing tiny bits of photo-etched hardware and generally faffing about, most of it is hidden when installed under the fuselage!

What’s under the lid?…