Just thought I would post images of my Shuttle kit here, just for the heck of it. This was built in 1981-1982 (Early Columbia).
I'm a fan of using real glass for windows. I used cut glass for each window pane for this model. A real "PANE" to cut...I probably broke 5 times more glass panes than I actually successfully made. But the quality is well worth the extra work. You can't believe the difference it makes.
The ID's on all of the tiles were done with a "ooo" brush (back in the days when I had amazing closeup vision. I know the scale of the tiles on this kit are way too large for the real thing, but then it would have taken 10 times longer to do them all! All in all, I spent maybe 2-3 months just doing the ID's...about 45 minutes to a couple of hours every day was all I could do without going crazy.
Also hand painted all of the control panels to match the real deal, although it is almost impossible to see here with the crew cabin roof glued down.
The 2-tone treatment of the main engines is not correct, but it just looked so cool when completed, that I didn't have the heart to destroy it.
A few of the black line details and the aft umbilical plates were done with the old, 3M INT Transfer process (don't know if they still make that product, but it was a great way to make your own decals, and as you can see, they have held up well over the last 28 years).
The cargo bay was finished off in aluminum mylar film. The radiator panel tubes were X-Acto knife scores.
The entire model was airbrushed with Future Wax to seal the decals down and give it a hard fairly indestructable coating. They're slogan was "Doesn't yellow!" Can't tell if they were lying or not.
But age has definitely yellowed the decal flattener, which is now painfully obvious.
The frustrating thing was that if you look at the 2 greys used for the wings and fuselage, I had inadvertantly gotten the two 2 tones switched (I accidentally got the colors reversed due to being tired). Oh well...
My only other regret, was that the seam where the roof meets the crew cabin is really bad. Trying to avoid sanding down the tile boundaries while sanding down the putty BETWEEN the boundaries was just about impossible.
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I'm a fan of using real glass for windows. I used cut glass for each window pane for this model. A real "PANE" to cut...I probably broke 5 times more glass panes than I actually successfully made. But the quality is well worth the extra work. You can't believe the difference it makes.
The ID's on all of the tiles were done with a "ooo" brush (back in the days when I had amazing closeup vision. I know the scale of the tiles on this kit are way too large for the real thing, but then it would have taken 10 times longer to do them all! All in all, I spent maybe 2-3 months just doing the ID's...about 45 minutes to a couple of hours every day was all I could do without going crazy.
Also hand painted all of the control panels to match the real deal, although it is almost impossible to see here with the crew cabin roof glued down.
The 2-tone treatment of the main engines is not correct, but it just looked so cool when completed, that I didn't have the heart to destroy it.
A few of the black line details and the aft umbilical plates were done with the old, 3M INT Transfer process (don't know if they still make that product, but it was a great way to make your own decals, and as you can see, they have held up well over the last 28 years).
The cargo bay was finished off in aluminum mylar film. The radiator panel tubes were X-Acto knife scores.
The entire model was airbrushed with Future Wax to seal the decals down and give it a hard fairly indestructable coating. They're slogan was "Doesn't yellow!" Can't tell if they were lying or not.
But age has definitely yellowed the decal flattener, which is now painfully obvious.
The frustrating thing was that if you look at the 2 greys used for the wings and fuselage, I had inadvertantly gotten the two 2 tones switched (I accidentally got the colors reversed due to being tired). Oh well...
My only other regret, was that the seam where the roof meets the crew cabin is really bad. Trying to avoid sanding down the tile boundaries while sanding down the putty BETWEEN the boundaries was just about impossible.
).
