Be Vewy Quiet… I'm Hunting Wabbits - F-22 Raptor - WIP
1September 3, 2024Out of the box, the cockpit looks great - but had to file out a lot of details for the Eduard PE set
2September 3, 2024Dry fitting of the pilot to make sure the arms are properly placed
3September 3, 2024Completed cockpit with pilot
4September 3, 2024
5September 3, 2024Not as smart as the Quinta studios decals, but looks good enough. Added X-22 to the LCD panels to make them pop
6September 3, 2024Assembly of the AIM-9X missile rail and dry fitting the attachments to the bay to ensure proper fit down the line
7September 3, 2024The landing gears are also assembled and dry fitted to the bays prior to ensure proper assembly.
The placement of the gear cover isn’t very clear on the instructions - so this is how it fits for anyone building this in the future.
8September 3, 2024
9September 3, 2024The majority of the parts are internal to the Raptor - so if you plan on having the bays exposed, you are in for a LOT of painting - mostly white.
10September 3, 2024I can’t brush paint worth a damn, so I just used some Tamiya masking tape as the yellow strips. Maybe I should have painted that yellow prior to sticking them on to make them pop…
11September 3, 2024The completed sidewinder bay. In himdsight, I should have held off gluing the rails till the end of the build. D’Oh!
12September 3, 2024The completed AMRAAM bay
13September 3, 2024The kit comes in two fuselage halves that run along natural seam lines - very nice!
But there are clearly mould injection marks that need to be sanded down - not so nice. ?♀️
14September 3, 2024Take great care in assembling the missile bays - as the guiding \ re-enforcement rods need to sit flush against them later o
15September 3, 2024Air intakes have some not so nice gaps in them…
16September 3, 2024But easily remedied with some putty
17September 3, 2024The reinforcement rods are great - but not Bandai Foolproof. You will need to use slower drying glue and perform proper test fitting between the halves to make sure they are aligned properly.
18September 3, 2024The engine cans are engineered perfectly so you don’t have to guess whether or not they were mounted properly - great job Hasegawa!
19September 3, 2024Now that everything is in place, time to mate both halves of the fuselage together. This is where pre-alignment of the struts pays off.
20September 3, 2024Although the bays were pre-painted, I missed pre-painting the Bay Area on the fuselage - time to mask and paint
21September 3, 2024Decals are provided for the meshing within the Raptor’s air-intakes, but if you look at this photo, it isn’t as well pronounced as the dark decals provided.
22September 3, 2024I lightly coated the decals to make them blend in more to match the real world photos..
The air intakes didn’t sit right - so that would be addressed later with more putty and sanding
23September 3, 2024The Eduard PE set requires small 1mm frets to be attached to the canopy runner. After wasting an hour trying to get these fitted with CA glue, I just scrapped this piece altogether. Note to Eduard, expecting people to glue ridiculously small pieces in a vertical manner isn’t that easy
24September 3, 2024Now comes the fun part - priming. Some people opted to black base and mottle their birds, I went the old fashioned way and mottled it in reverse.
25September 3, 2024I wanted the ram panels to pop out a bit more - hence the traditional light priming with pre-shades. The mottling had a mix of black and blues. I kept the mottling restrained as I wanted to keep the layers nice and thin.
26September 3, 2024There are two ways to get the Raptor’s silver gray sheen.
1) Paint it all with clear aluminum and then lightly coat it with aggressor gray or
2) Cteate a mix of 1:1 have glass grey with polished aluminum - thinned down with a 2:1 ratio of Mr. Leveler. I went with option #2
27September 3, 2024This is the target color and level of reflective sheen I am targetting
28September 3, 2024At an angle, you can see the sheen go through…
Using my wife’s trusty Mk. 1 eyeballs, I later would have to add a thin coat of Aluminum to this.
29September 3, 2024Hasegawa gives you the scaling in which you can blow the picture up to create masking templates. Loosely taping it to the fuselage will give you that nice feathered look.
30September 3, 2024A drop or two of X-1 was added to the Have Glass grey to darken it up. The sheen shows up better here.
31September 3, 2024In retrospect, I should have painted the leading and trailing edged FIRST and then masked them prior to painting the main fuselage. It would have been 3X faster. Oops.
32September 3, 2024The curve was also fun - I used a 1mm tape to make the line accurate, and then attached bits of masking tape.
33September 3, 2024The nozzle coloring is all over the place - so I just settled with this instead -I wanted my Raptor to look somewhat newer so I left the panel above the engine burnt vs burnt + reddish rust
34September 3, 2024My attempts at being lazy didn’t work. Creating a template out of flexible tape to re-use failed…
35September 3, 2024These had to be reworked
36September 3, 2024The colors I used. You can lighten and darker by adding white or black.
37September 3, 2024The fuselage is looking good - time for clear coating.
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2 3 September, 16:33
Album info
There are many F-22 kits out there, but only one worthy of this awesome jet - Hasegawa's 1/48th scale F-22A. this kit languished on my shelf not out of lack of love, but fear that I wouldn't do it justice.
Now that I have figured out how to replicate the Have Glass gray ('which also opens up the HAF F-16 for me), and my airbrushing skills have progressed beyond the monkey throwing paint phase, I present to you the HAS F-22!
