Tim,
Thanks for the welcome back home.

The Vallejo putty is traffic stuff used for small areas, but does shrink a lot. So be prepared for a few applications to do the job. A Qtip tip dampened with plain water is all that you need.
Joel

Hi all
I was not very happy with the colour of the engine nozzle. I had sprayed it with Humbrol Aluminium from a rattle can. The surface looked a little uneven and looked too much like orange peel. So I stripped the paint off, re primed the surface and sprayed on some Tamiya flat black. As I intended to use Alclad II aluminium I gave the black a couple of coats of Kleer. I would have used gloss black, but there was none around. I had a little matt black paint left in the cup. Not enough to place back in the jar, so I did some pre shading on the upper airframe. The Alclad II went on superbly and it took two coats to achieve a nice consistent look. The ring just forward of the nozzle had some heavily thinned Tamiya blue applied lightly. This slightly bluish tinge seems quite common On F-16’s.






To be continued

Tim,
Nice save on the exhaust can. It really does look quite good now.
Joel

Thanks Joel, it does look a lot better than it did before.

Next I decided to put together the parts for the wheels. First they were primed along with the under carriage doors. The breakdown of the wheels means there is no need for masks or a steady hand when painting the tyres and hub detail. The tyres and the hubs do need some cleaning up. The tyres do have slight ejector marks on the gluing surface. Firm pressure is required to achieve a good tight fit, but as you can see they look pretty good as do the inner surface of the under carriage doors.



To be continued

Looks really good.

Tim,
Those wheels are certainly nicely detailed. Same goes for the gear doors.
Joel

Thanks guys
I'm not sure why but the wheels are my favourite parts of this build. I really like the detail on the hubs and the inner under carriage doors. Whoever at Kinetic Models created these gems should be very proud of themselves.
tim