Having stripped off the Christmas tablecloth and moved the bottles of booze (hic), I set up my new daylight magnifier lamp and broke out the Special Hobby Saab J-21A I'd bought specially for this GB.
It's a limited run kit so I have no illusions about this build being a simple case of "throw it together and slap some paint on". That said the model looks very nice in the box.
The instructions are clear and very well produced, listing numbers for Gunze/Mr Hobby paints so my first action was to make a conversion list of equivalent Tamiya/Humbrol paints. A bit of research I'd done previously showed that SH are pretty much bang on with their colour recommendations.
The kit has very fine recessed detail but also features big mould lugs, however all of them are out of sight and SH's styrene is soft and easy to sand. Quite normal for a kit of this kind. It does mean though that extra care must be taken when sanding off moulding gates.
I started construction, as per usual, with the cockpit. On this kit the cockpit is a work of art in itself and displays an incredible level of detail for 1/72nd scale. The throttle quadrant box alone features a total of 7 parts in styrene, resin and etched metal. I got through it though with the help of the new magnifier.
I painted the cockpit walls and attached the throttle quadrant.
Next came the seat and cockpit floor/bulkhead. 11 parts for the seat, 6 for the floor/bulkhead and 3 for the nosewheel well.
The cockpit was fitted around the nosewheel bay. The bay itself wasn't a great fit, but it's nothing a little filler can't cure.
The interior colour is Tamiya XF-21 (black green) which SH also recommend as the upper surface colour for the aircraft exterior. This was dry brushed with metallic grey and came up very nicely. I didn't want to give the aircraft an overly weathered look as I felt that, particularly in a peacetime context, overdoing the weathering and wear would be unrealistic.
Having got the cockpit and u/c bay fully secure I fitted the Instrument panel. This, in itself contains another 4 parts, including a film insert and etched face plus a resin gunsight.
With this in place, I set about adding noseweight. One advantage in tidying away my bench for Christmas was that I found a bag of lead shot I forgot I had so this was applied with thick Zap-A-Gap. I have no idea if I have the 8 grams recommended by SH but I have got as much in there as I can at the moment. When the fuselage halves have cured fully I'll add more in the gaps underneath and behind the cockpit.
More updates soon.
