Scale-Master

The suspension on these kits is actually engineered pretty well, but due to the nature of the white metal some parts had to be bent into shape. This one took a good amount of fiddling to get the wheelbase equal on both sides with no binding between the body chassis and suspension.

Keep in mind Rich, this happened a decade ago. I shelved it for a while. I do have a new kit, but I want to save this one. There's no reason to alert Tamiya about this as the paint is a decade old. Not the same batches as what is available now. I still use the TS-36, it is a good paint. Other things were at play that created this issue I now know for the experiences I learned on this and subsequent projects. I have used the TS-26 over several base colors and it has some very good properties.

I washed it up to get a better idea of what I was dealing with. The only option, as I see it, is to strip it. Unfortunately the many layers of paint might as well be a combination of CA and stucco. About 15% of it peeled off to what appears to be the base white. I guess I forgot how many layers of both white and red paint I applied trying to get this to look decent and most of the red is now hard as glass and really well adhered. (So it does eventually cure.)

To recap, I started this in September of 2009. In January of 2011 I started noticing paint issues like cracking on the nose. At that point it was all TS paints including the clear. I fixed the nose by hand painting the damaged decals and then I sealed it in urethane. Then the paint on the rear wing went bad and I had to make new decals as replacements were not available. For five years I chased the paint on the main body. In my mind I had to keep using the same TS paints until I could get a stable finish and apply the decals. Then the plan was to clear it with urethane (as I had done with the nose and rear wing). I would get it looking nice and a few to several months later it would pick up waves or even wrinkles. I'd sand and buff them out, wait until the paint seemed cured and stable only to have it happen somewhere else. Well, the paint never stabilized as of 2016 so I went on to several bigger and better projects and let the body sit in a safe place. Out of sight, out of mind... And it really got bad; wavy, wrinkly and just plain wonky over the years. The body actually cracked somehow. I'm not sure if it was due to the paint, but it wouldn't surprise me. From this point on I am sharing the current salvage work after putting it on hold for over nine years. Here is what I'm re-starting with after I peeled some of the clear off. I'm surprised it shed that so easily.

This is from 9-4-2015 (exactly 8 years ago): It’s been well over a year since I last updated the work I’ve been doing on the body. Every month or two I’d sand the wrinkles out and let it set, only to have new ones appear. Sand them out, wait and repeat. It looks like it might have finally stabilized, but I won’t be too surprised if it reoccurs either. After all, it’s been the better part of five years since I started painting the body… Last night I took another stab at it and after sanding out some ripples I blended in some red on the right side and sharpened up the lines on the front with some white.

1988 Monogram kit of a fictional plane. It's supposed to be able to fly at Mach 25. Fun project. WIP:http://www.modelcarsmag.com/forums/topic/184228-x-30-supersonic-aircraft/

I added more silver decal stripes for the color break on the tails too.

The kit decals were what one would expect considering the age and level of detail in the kit; not great and a bit out of registration, but at least decal solvent was mildly helpful on them. However they do not react well with a hair dryer. The two red stripes on the underside refused to conform to the basic contours so I replaced them with Scale-Master silver decal stripes.

While it could be 1/144th scale, I think that is a misconception as the the stock number is coincidentally #1144. There is no mention of scale on the box or instructions. It's hard to figure the scale of a fictional subject with no known elements to scale off of, but judging from the windows (decals) I would guess it to about the same size an XB-70 Valkyrie. If so, that puts it closer to 1/200 scale.

I followed the painting instructions for the most part but used black in some of the places it called out dark blue. (The box art has black/gray in those areas and it looks more believable.)

The gauge decals went on fine too…

OK, this thing has been sitting for quite a while (many months) due to the paint fighting with itself on the main body. Most of the car is done; I just need to finish the body. A few times I sanded out the wrinkles (on the right rear) and touched up the paint only to have the issue come back a month or so later, so I stopped touching it up but continued to sand out the wrinkles as they appeared every few months. I thought I had won the battle back in April 2012, but sadly the same thing happened a little while after I painted it once again. I continued to sand it as problems manifested, but I noticed it has been pretty stable all year. It’s been about 6-8 months since I last sanded the problem area and it looked the same as when I last checked. First I had to blend the white base in, and I found by tinting white primer with yellow and pink I could apply less paint and get an even blendable base. Then I started building up the Fluorescent Red. You can see what I painted yesterday does not match, (it is too pale and lacking vibrancy, and not 100% uniform), but it is all the paint I can apply this round. Today I built up some more TS-36. Still not there, but getting closer… It still needs another round of paint, but I’ll probably let this dry for a while to make masking easier…

1988 Monogram kit of a fictional plane. It's supposed to be able to fly at Mach 25. This is four of the six parts of the plane. (There are two more parts for the stand too.) The fit was pretty good but there were a few shrink marks that had to be filled and a bunch of ejector pin spots too. I shot it with Tamiya TS-100 as it is a close match to the color it was molded in, and the instructions show to use the plastic as one of the colors.

All eight tire decals went on just fine, so clearly there are no ill effects of sun-bleaching there.

Usually the fragility is already "baked in" before putting them in the sun. I have not had problems with sun-bleaching making otherwise usable decals crack. But since so many decals that have yellowed are older and already prone to cracking I can see why some people believe it is an issue.

I left the body to dry in a closet for a more than five months due to the paint wrinkling issue. It seemed like it had cured and might be stable… So I sanded out the defects and reshot a white base let that dry/cure for a while and then built up and blended the TS-36 Fluorescent Red into the rest of the rear section. It looks like I may be on my way to saving it as it still looks like this after about 24 hours… Only time will tell…

I've been doing this trick for over 50 years. Never had a problem with colors fading.

The decals are (like many kits from this era) yellowed. Making replacements is not a problem, but if the artwork isn't bad, even if it is a bit dated, I like to try to build these kits using what comes in the box. These have been taped to the inside of a window in my shop that gets direct sunlight for most of each day to sun-bleach them for two weeks. Both the clear and the white benefited from this. I'll put them back on the window until they are needed just to get maximum results, but this is possibly as bleached as they will get.

Now we're getting to what ultimately sidelined this project for a decade. I used Tamiya Fine White Primer as the base, and then applied TS-26 over all parts that were to be white or Fl. Red. The white was allowed to dry and cure fully before the TS-36 was applied. Once the TS-36 was built up, I sprayed a few light "sealer" coats of TS-13 over all the white and Fl. Red areas. Not moderate, not heavy coats, and within the standard recoat safe timeframe. All was fine, for several weeks while it sat in a closet to dry/cure. Then it went wonky and I had to chase the problems as they presented themselves... It sat again for quite a while. Months later… Finally (!), I was able to fix the paint that was not drying correctly. I sanded out the cracked areas on the nose section and repainted it. You can see it was being problematic for a while and that I had tried to repaint it before by the “tree rings”. Here is how nasty it was looking while being sanded out and reworked… As for the main red section of the body, I sanded out part of it and found that TS-36 can be successfully blended into finished areas of the same paint, so I only had to paint part of that big area. I applied the paint very, very slowly this time only by airbrush over an 8 hour period, lightly building it up and paying close attention to the blend lines. Once it proves to me that it is stable, I’ll move onto decals and clear coat…

It's done:

WIP:

The rear wing is assembled. Tamiya paints and SMS C/F decals…

And now the front wing is done… I had to hand repaint the Shell lettering after the decals cracked under the Tamiya clear. C/F is SMS. The Goodyear decals are a pair that I made.

The windshield is not a positive fit, and it's also short and stubby at the front, on par for these kits... (I trimmed and fitted it before painting.) Canopy glue did a good job of hiding much of the fit issues. It is vac-u-formed in the tinted blue color.

I had some paint issues that necessitated stripping some parts and sanding out others and repainting them. The rear wing end plates had to be stripped and I had to make replacement decals since they are not available from Tamiya.