F-302 Project Update

The F-302 is nearing completion.

I have spent some additional effort dressing up my kit’s cockpit, mostly because it looks so bare straight out of the box.  It’s not overly accurate or detailed – but to be fair, at the time this kit was commissioned, there were not a lot of references available.  The pattern maker provided a couple of instrument panels and two seats; these look to have been sourced from plastic kits.  The layout of the panels is wrong, but a thick coat of paint (I used Intermediate Grey, but it’s not dark enough) and the provided screen decals can take care of that.  I did a half-assed job of adding the various lighted buttons you can see in the studio set using different colors of paint applied with a pin.  I would have been better off to slice up tiny chips of .010” styrene strip to give the panels and side walls some sorely-needed relief detail.

All the kit pieces needed judicious sanding and shaping to get them to fit without interfering with the resin canopy.  That’s pretty much par for the course with resin kits – or any limited run cottage industry kit, really.

I found a couple 1/72 scale helicopter pilots that I thought I could squeeze in, though they would need surgery.  Pretty extensive surgery, it turns out  - I probably should have used a couple Hasegawa Valkyrie pilots and reshaped their helmets.  As it was, I had to chop off most of their legs and sand down both their backsides and the seats in order to get everything to fit.

Fixing the  kit canopy was my next chore.  Out of the box it looks  … frosted ….  not because of bubbles or casting defects, but because the master was not polished. Both sides of the thing (in and out) were covered with a rough grey primer, and the resin faithfully picked that up. Plus a fingerprint! (might have even been mine)

I used 600, 800 and 2000 grit sandpaper to get it as smooth as possible. But doing so left very fine scratches in the resin, so it now looked “fogged”. If it were plastic I would have used Novus on it. I remembered an old tip about polishing out scratches with toothpaste - but you have to use the regular kind, not the gels. And all we have are gels in the house.

And then I remembered what my dentist uses on my teeth: baking soda.

I poured a small amount of baking soda on the canopy, then grabbed a toothbrush - I have one of those battery-powered ones that I use for scrubbing kits before I start building. It took a while, and maybe a tablespoon of baking soda in total, but the results were phenomenal. After the required dip in Future, the thing is crystal clear.

It fits in place well enough, after the usual test fitting, and sanding both the top of the pilot’s instrument panel and the sides of the canopy.  EXCEPT on the starboard side.  There’s a 1.5 mm gap towards the front, which tapers down to 0 as you go aft.  I thought the canopy piece itself was warped, but it’s not.  The Fuselage there is just cut down more than on the port side.  To fix this, I superglued a strip of styrene to the fuselage and carefully sanded it backuntil the canopy fits without a gap.  I lost some surface detail on the side of the fuselage in the process, but it was pretty soft to begin with.  I replaced it with panels cut to shape from sign vinyl (thanks Erin!)

Tonight I’ll mask the canopy and add the tail fins, so tomorrow I should be able to start the final painting.