White night (Starship, Eurofighters, B-17, Norseman)

Thankfully the uncomfortably warm weather seems to have moved on, and will be replaced for the next couple of weeks by upper 70s, which I can at least tolerate. In celebration, I spent an hour or so in the garage doing some painting. And it's a good thing, because my paint queue has been growing pretty extensive!

Three of the models required Gloss White. First, I put a surface coat onto the Beech Starship. I define a surface coat as, after any required buffing on the first (color) coat, a relatively thin top coat that fills in all the buffing scars, generally just reinforces the paint color, and provides a smoother surface. Sometimes I can avoid this by getting the mix on the color coat correct, but there was some seam work that was necessary on this A Model kit. Not unusual on a kit of this maker, but I do dearly love watching an interesting shape like the Starship moving its way through my modelling queues.

Second, I had to put a first coat of White onto the Ear Falls Airways Noorduyn Norseman. It seemed to go on pretty well, so hopefully that will be it for this color. Next comes a patch of Black on the underside, some International Orange on the wings, and of course Aluminum for the floats.

Final use of White came in laying down a coat for the stripes and underside arrow for the what-if Red Arrows Eurofighter. There are no decals specifically for this type, or course, so I decided just to mask the stripe and assemble the other markings I need from the spares box (mostly leftover RA Hawks).

The other two colors on tonight's menu were for another Eurofighter and an RAF B-17. After the epic masking job on the B-17/Fortress, I put on a coat of Dark Earth. And the Barley Grey on the Eurofighter was really just to repair a pair of spots where the paint bubbled unaccountably.

That completed the paint session. I have also been working on finishing up construction on the space shuttle. Most of the major assembly is complete, though I still have to attach one of the cargo bay doors. Attaching the first one was no easy job, and there will be some serious clean up once the glue has cured. Then I will attach the end bit where the engine nozzles all reside (the nozzles themselves will be attached later in the process). I recently picked up a new bottle of Jet Exhaust from Alclad and I'll be trying it out on the space shuttle exhaust as well as that on the Eurofighters.