Finally an update, it will be large
before heading off to do the Japanese Airfield Dio. I thought a good idea to finish up this project
and get some of that modelling "feel" back and it has always been on my mind and on the workbench. This is in the span of a week to two week period.
Good and bad news, good news 1. the kit is almost complete and progress has been going well, I had a bad batch of putty and all my seam lines that were perfect had shrunk (such a downer after having airbrushed everything nicely for a J-8H) so I had to redo them and sand most of the beautiful finish
2. Friends from China sent some excellent references and photos of the F-8IIM aircraft (1996 version)
and I was able to find a video of this beauty online in flight, so I ended up back dating the kit to F-8IIM status, which means cutting the third wing slats that were added and changing some panel lines, most of the panel line differences were on the tail but there are also some small differences on the rest of the aircraft. As the base model was a J-8IIB that had upgraded engines and radar (Russian Zhuk II radar). This doesn't change too much of the interior of the radar as I figured out I had been building the Zhuk all along from another video
The F-8IIM I'll be building below:
The Bad News 1. The kit slipped out of my hands and hit the floor just before airbrushing, bottom nose section snapped off and is in the midst of being repaired as I type. A good lesson not to do night building
Here are the progress shots for the putty, Silver sections are repaired with putty and I am testing out whether it looks good or needs more repair.
Day 1, I started to inch off the required wing slats one by one as they were fixed tight. Putty was applied to fix the left panel line, I noticed there wasn't a straight edge and had a curve in the middle.
Day 2/3
This left line down the fuselage presented a problem and it ended up taking a good week of reapplying to fix
Some other panel lines near the cockpit ended up being re-done and back dated to J-8IIB status as the F-8IIM was based off of that previous airframe.
Tail interior lines fixed as well,
Day 4-7 - I went over and marked off the fuselage section to fill in these "lines" across the rear section, there were no lines present in any of the J-8IIB photos that I have. The Tail received a major overhaul and panel lines were re-adjusted,
no pics of these parts as I wanted to complete this quickly.
Along with some final tail fixing this was the last photo take before the accident
more work was done to the rear after the silver paint revealed a slight seam still remained,
Day 10 - Currently I re-made the front fuselage section as the old one broke in the accident, progress is going well so far and I hope to have another update soon (in the next couple days, not years!
)
Thanks all for checking this thread out and any comments, feel great to be posting and contributing again