NZEOD

Sorry its been so slow. Still renovating the house, building an MTB/Trials track in the huge backyard, racing MotoX, Kite surfing and work! Pretty busy summer so far!

I'll sort videos soon. They flicker randomly through a range of similar colour and go from a slow burn to full afterburner and back.

haha dont join the Army then, they pull them just for kicks! had 4 done under orders when I first joined... so much fun. Codeine... embrace it. naa its still a pretty violent and brutal act. Especially if you have ones that arent fully exposed.

Here is a Super pack nozzle with a shinier Alclad finish. Next to it is a Neopixel Mini LED unit. The lens in the bottom of the nozzle is made with drops of clear Araldite clear 5min epoxy resin. So... the neopixel is a 4K LED, built in microprocessor to handle the commands from the Adruino board, resistors and the circuit board. All in one tiny package. They are also blindingly bright! Some shots of a Nozzle lit up

The Neopixels are brilliant to work with as they come mounted on the board ready to go. The board gets trimmed on a dremel slightly so it fits tightly into the nozzle holders on the Hasegawa kits and you get zero light bleed as they are directional LEDs. So all the light is focused forwards and not out to the sides like a conventional 5mm round LED. You also get access to 4K colour so any colour can be displayed. Just type in the RGB codes same as you would in Photoshop and away you go. Next VF will get polished mirrored surfaces on the insides of the jet exhausts to throw more light and more reflections. The one in the photos has an Alclad II matt black finish which was a mistake.

http://smg.photobucket.com/user/slydesigns/slideshow/THEPC Di electric Enamel coated wires for the LED system. Red for 5V, Black for GND and Blue for Data In. They will run down the landing gear legs as "brakelines" and be painted over. They will terminate as pins that will fit into sockets in the Carrier deck.

I've sorted getting the part. Thanks all. Was messing round with the tinting as I have already tried a version of the tinted Future method with great success. I used a mix of yellow and red food grade colouring and a few drops of Modelmaster Gold Acryl in a bottle of Future to tint a canopy in the Gold F16 HARM style. Worked really well. I assumed I'd be able to do even better with the Alclad 2 Tint... I was wrong. yeah... I guess if I had a mold I could poor the Thinners in and hope it evaporated to leave a nice shiny new canopy but... .. well you got to have dreams I guess. It makes for a great magic trick though

Had a mishap last night dissolving a VF-1D canopy in thinners... will work on the decals tonight Want this design on one of the Valkyries

Experimenting with gold tinting canopies last night and I made a mistake... ...kind of funny, kind of stupid, kind of moronic even... yeah a mistake. I wanted to remove the tint to redo and as I was using ALCLAD II Laquers it dried fast and hard. So after trying to get it off with testors thinners and airbrush cleaner I had an idea... a stupid one looking back. I dropped the canopy into some Tamiya Thinners... Came back later to get it and... ...its gone. More accurately its no longer a solid and has 100% dissolved into solution! SO... is it possible to source replacement VF-1D canopies? Yeah... thats the worse part... its a rare 2 seater! You'd think a qualified Bomb Tech would know better... you'd think...

About to find out tonight. Have a few different papers to try and also my Hydrographics media for doing Gun wraps. Will try them all.

You can get a brilliant printer for Decal printing cheap from Canon. Most Inkjets for home are between 600 x 2400 dpi and 4800 x 1200... the Canon PIXMA MX922 we just picked up for $95NZD has a 5 colour cartridge print resolution of 9600 x 2400 dpi!! So thats crispy tiny writing without visible dots, blurring and fading.

More Yukikaze/Stealth/Top Gun, less Gundam/Power Rangers please Knifing a tank like they do in Heavy Gear is one thing... Dancing duelists with Power Ranger swords is just too far into the Lameside of the force.

Where do you get your decals made?

I want to make a team of Heavy hitters out of some VF-1Ds and need to gauge opinions on some of the mad planes. VE-1G is a Growler style EW plane. Lots of extra aerials and pods along with 2 Dual mount HARM Missiles (or ALARM British ones) and a pair of 3 pack AMMs or 3 pack IRIS-T missiles (just cause they can engage a plane behind the Growler with a 60G, 60°/sec turn rate!) VF-1F is a Gun fighter in the literal sense with two short barrel 55mm carbine cannons instead of the single long rifle cannon and AMM or UMM packs. VF-1P is a Gun fighter with a single rifle backed up by 2 hip mounted 30mm gun pods - GEPOD-30 Pod mounted Warthog cannons (Engine mounted in fighter mode) and the usual Missile packs or 3 Packs of Brimstone AGMs. Switching out all VF-1D twin head laser cannons for quad head cannons Too much? Not enough? The Super pack versions will mount dual Twin Beam cannons instead of the single Twin Beams

you use those coloured chalk bars to weather things with I take it?

....and a courier has just walked into my office with a package for me... its my super rare Two Bobs Decal pack for Casper and his Bandit Ghosts! These things are insanely detailed too!!! They are the USN/Marines F/A-18 Aggressor Squadron with the unique paint jobs.

I know have 3 of the models wired up and in major assemblies. The last one was the VF-1D and I wish I hadn't picked this one up. I really like it and now want to build a pile of them as UN Navy and UN Marine Growler and Multirole units. Just picked up on one of each of the Hasegawa Weapons Packs so will mess arouns with Targetting and ECM pods for a VF-1G 2 Seater Growler variant and also try out the SUU-23a and GEPOD-30 cannon pods to add some more firepower to one of the 1Ds as a gunship

Just be aware the Rafale has the wing control surfaces in the upward position on takeoff, and not down like flaps on a non Delta wing plane...

Where did you get the decals done?

Been raining here and we cant be bothered going Motocrossing so been spending the free time this weekend working on the next one, a VF-11B. Engines are drilled out and fitted with lenses and a Neopixel unit each. Instrument panel has been machined out to just leave the frame only, then the space refilled with clear resin, the dash decal applied and an RGB LED fitted behind the panel to light through it. The Wing Landing lights have been carved out and fitted with a pair of sanded down RGB LEDs in each side. Landing gear has the lacquered wire fitting and a strand running down each leg like a brake line. These will slide into a socket hidden under the Carrier deck and will be how the lighting and effects on the plane are powered and controlled. Nose leg is the Adruino Data In line, left leg is the +5V feed and right leg is the Ground. Lessons learnt... Watch the chuck on a Dremel... if it touched the model it will chew it in the blink of an eye... Watch the amount of heat you apply to a mounted LED... too much and it was deform the models plastic... Watch the damn Soldering Iron tip! It will carve up the models plastic like a Lightsaber!!! All easily fixed luckily.

So I was slicing up wings on VF-11s to seperate the control surfaces when I thought I'd check out Carrier launch vids while I did it - to get the control surfaces set up right on the displays. Thats when I noticed 2 weird things... No.1... the Rudders on the F/A-18s are set up to go full deflection in and I couldn't work out why this would be. http://theaviationist.com/2009/10/25/f-18-rudders-during-take-off/ The above provides the answer... and if you want to do some accurate modelling of VFs it's semi relevant as they also use angled tail fins. "That position of the rudders is common to all the Hornets, not only those departing from the flight deck of an aircraft carrier: the rudders are deflected to help the nose raising as the aircraft leaves the ship. Since the vertical fins are angled outwards, deflecting both rudders inwards gives a downward component of lift, which acts behind the center of gravity generating a momentum that assists the elevators." Wierd thing no.2... I went looking for Canard fighters on carriers to see if anything was done with the forward planes on launch and found a video of Rafales taking off on the USS Harry S Truman... Most planes go full flaps down to get off a carrier, the Delta wings appear to go full wing controls up (due to no tail so no tail elevator), with leading edges full down and canards fairly neutral. The VF-0D I'm modelling is a Delta... Lesson learnt. One other thing thats a bit of a sticking point for modelling a catapult launch is that they preload the front leg on the catapult. So the plane appears to crouch and is lower at the nose than on a runway takeoff. Its an issue with VFs because of the underslung cannon and the electronics on the Elint model. They are already super low to the ground... But without the preloaded stance they just dont look right...

Dont forget even alot of Modern fighters arent flyable without computer control assistance. So making a scale model version to fly without that assistance in flight, liberties have to be taken.

WOW... the guy that did the SV51 project is on to upgrading it and ALSO.... building a Yukikaze FRX-99 RAFE!

The 19s cheat alittle in that the canards are enlarged and on a horizontal plane now instead of the smaller 45deg ones on the lineup and kitsets

So... Tie Fighters now have turrets? Nice! Latest trailer shows a Tie being tailed by an X-Wing pulling out from the island base fight and firing the to rear on the chasing X-Wing