Project Capstone: Thunderhawk Build Log 3

 A long gap since my last update; as alluded to, life has been complex.  But progress has occasionally continued on the Thunderhawk project, and we are now getting excitingly close to completion.  At the end of my previous update, I had the insides painted and the wings glued on.  

Draw the rest of the owl

What can I say?  Then I glued everything else on.  Well, I guess I can say a bit more than that.  I started by gluing everything on underneath, if I had started on the top I’d have broken bits when I turned it over.  The feet went on as predicted, having previously drilled and set the pins, and as predicted getting the diagonal supporting in afterwards was fiddly but doable with tweezers.  They seem solidly sturdy.

For the most part I just glued things on with glue as they weren’t structural and had decent contact areas, but I pinned the hinge pieces on the strike wings as I predicted friction might otherwise force those apart, and I pinned the front port winglet as the contact point was dodgy.  Oh and I pinned the turbo laser barrel of course, with a very long pin.

I didn’t glue the three main thrusters, or the many small ventral thrusters, as they will be sprayed silver instead.  I didn’t glue the canopy, of course.  I also glued the pilots together, but did not glue them into their seats, it will be much easier to paint both them and the cockpit separately.  Oh and I didn’t glue the side hatches, I’m still hoping to get some with raven icons on instead.  

Easy as that!  Done!  LOL  Not quite…  There were still some huge gaps to fill between parts.  I did this in two stages, first of all doing a rough stuff and fill with green stuff and superglue and letting it dry completely for 24hrs.  Then I could come back for a second pass and have something solid to push against when filling with more green stuff and sculpting a smooth finish.  This obviously took me hours and hours as there were big gaps between basically every single part.  

I also painted the window frames in the canopy with a liquid mask.  It’s just liquid latex, so it dries clear, but you can kind of see it still wet here:

The wingtip heavy bolter turrets also got a bit of love, with magnets glues in to hold them on whilst letting them rotate.  There’s a lot of space inside the turret, so it was very straightforward to just glue them in, no cunning countersinking required.  

Paint It, Black.

With the build complete, I spent a bit of time whooshing it around, as is tradition for all model aircraft and spacecraft.  Then I started to consider how the hell to actually paint this monster.  The small sub-assemblies mentioned above are very straightforward, no worries there, but the main body of the Thunderhawk is massive, heavy, and delicate.  A terrible combination.

The solution I came up with was to build a tall spray stand by putting a bin bag over the outside of a large flip-top dustbin.  This would make it easy to get all the angles on a static model.  That said, the very underneath would never be accessible that way, and as a flying model I couldn’t afford to completely ignore the underneath.  My solutions was simply to hold the damn thing in one hand.  For ages.  

It was the only way I could thing of to suitable cushion the upper hull whilst I sprayed the belly.  I did rest my arm on the bin, so I wasn’t exactly holding it at arms length like some sadistic weight training exercise.  But I had to hold it whilst I sprayed, and then hold it whilst it dried.  Once that was done, I could pop it on it’s feet and take my time moving around and giving it a thorough spray form every conceivable angle.  

Sadly once it was dry and I got it back inside I could see I hadn’t managed to get into many of the deep and inaccessible crevices.  So stage two was to laboriously hand paint in all those deep crevices.  This was both incredible tedious and also, despite my best efforts, gave an inconsistent black coat.  The only solution then, a second pass with the spray!  

Progress is progress Brother

Whilst all that was going on, I did make some progress with the sub-assemblies.  Which is to say, I finished them.  As with all my Raven Guard, the black armour is the easiest part, simply using a careful drybrush of Dawnstone directly onto the black.  The metal is more complex, starting with painting Leadbelcher onto anything not already sprayed with it.  An agrax earthshade wash followed by a gloss nuln oil gives a nice oiled metal effect, which I then finished with a drybrush of Vallejo air steel to pick out the edges.

That's it for now, I know it's been slow progress, but the end is in sight.  Victoris aut Mortis.