Yet another Fine Molds 1/72 Falcon build

mancini said:
Started on the inside of the cockpit yesterday and after priming several pieces I got a little bored while waiting for the primer to dry...

... so I started thinking about battle damage :love. My initial thoughts were to just paint the blast marks and maybe just do some of the most visible holes. In the end I decided that something like that would not do my Falcon justice so I opted for an accurate 5-footer battle damage reproduction. As you can imagine I went nuts with my dremel :D. I have finished the top hull and cockpit sections, with the escape pods and bottom hull still waiting to be done. I have also copied the damage to the edges of the saucer section from the 5-footer (lots of breaking stuff, gluing it back on and filling stuff with putty) so I'm wondering how that will turn out :confused.

As I was happily hacking at the oh so carefully sanded and polished hull (as I managed to scratch it in several places while customising it) I have also decided to scribe the "lip" as recommended by Jaitea ... thanks BTW ;-).

After I had finished all of these changes I realised one thing. I would have to prime the whole hull again (or at least most of it) which would mean I'd have as many as four coats of primer on various sections of the hull :facepalm. As I was already quite unhappy with the lack of detail in some areas, one more coat would just kill the entire model. So I decided to remove the primer from the hull altogether and start again... so stupid. I know that some of you might think of this move as fairly excessive but bear in mind that this is my first attempt at priming anything straight from the can and that I probably used way more paint then most of you would have. And since I didn't want to ruin the entire model because I got lazy one afternoon I just did it.

I'll hopefully post some new images soon as I'm currently also working on the ramp and thinking about the final lighting setup.

Oh and I figured something out. Many of you had airbrushed the inside of the hull with several coats of black to block light. My experience was that instead of doing that I just held the hull against my table lamp and just covered the places that let light through with a thin layer of putty ... et voila.
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I did the same thing on mine and I'm glad I did! I love all the bent panels, it really sells the damage. I also did the big crumpled panel on the bottom which required some dremeling and styrene as it is really crumpled. I documented all that damage in my post. Can't wait to see yours! I also recommend the 5 footers grill damage and rust. First used a needle to bend them up using reference of the 5 footer. I painted them the same as the base color then sprayed them black underneath and a heavy black wash on top. Finally I added rust with both paint and pastels. All these things add to the 'piece of junk'. Seemed wierd to me that the ship would be so dirty and damaged, but all the panels and grills would be perfectly straight:unsure.
 
Removing the primer is driving me nuts!! :behave

What's the best way to remove Tamiya fine grey primer? I used Tamiya lacquer thinner and I sincerely hope that this is not the way to go.
 
mancini said:
Oh and I figured something out. Many of you had airbrushed the inside of the hull with several coats of black to block light. My experience was that instead of doing that I just held the hull against my table lamp and just covered the places that let light through with a thin layer of putty ... et voila.
Click to expand...

Just a thought: I blocked light leakage in the hull by covering all the individual light sources with black fabric tape. Works like a charm and no need to paint the interior. For the cockpit tube, where there was no room for tape, I covered the tube interior with aluminium tape, no light penetrates that stuff. I'm very happy with this solution.

mancini said:
What's the best way to remove Tamiya fine grey primer? I used Tamiya lacquer thinner and I sincerely hope that this is not the way to go.
Click to expand...

For removing enamel paint I sink the part in drain opener for a few hours. It doesn't affect polystyrene, but it burns enamel paint clean off. It might be nasty for brass, though, I don't know. I'd never, ever use thinner to remove paint from polystyrene, unless the paint was still fresh and in small area.
 
mancini said:
Removing the primer is driving me nuts!! :behave

What's the best way to remove Tamiya fine grey primer? I used Tamiya lacquer thinner and I sincerely hope that this is not the way to go.
Click to expand...

Oven cleaner!!!! 1.Spray 2. place in a plastic bag and tie up air tight (well not air tight realy). 3 leave for 24 hours.

Will not do anything to the brass.

Ozzy
 
ozzyguanche said:
Oven cleaner!!!! 1.Spray 2. place in a plastic bag and tie up air tight (well not air tight realy). 3 leave for 24 hours.

Will not do anything to the brass.

Ozzy
Click to expand...

Well, after a brief test my oven cleaner has taken care of acrylics (practically immediately) and somewhat removed the primer (probably needs that 24 hour treatment) and has not destroyed the styrene :) ... but has turned my brass to black :confused.
 
I don't know its availability in Europe, but Floquil makes a product called "Easy Lift Off". It is a chemical paint stripper that seems safe enough for plastic and can remove Tamiya primer. I found that out when I had a disaster on the wing of a P-39 model once. So I painted this stuff on it to strip the paint and it took even the layer of Tamiya spray primer off without damaging the wing's plastic.

Considering how oven cleaner likes to eat aluminium foil, I'm not surprised the brass turned black. I hope that is all it did though. I'm not a chemical engineer, so I have no idea what goes on in the chemical process.
 
JMChladek said:
I don't know its availability in Europe, but Floquil makes a product called "Easy Lift Off". It is a chemical paint stripper that seems safe enough for plastic and can remove Tamiya primer. I found that out when I had a disaster on the wing of a P-39 model once. So I painted this stuff on it to strip the paint and it took even the layer of Tamiya spray primer off without damaging the wing's plastic.

Considering how oven cleaner likes to eat aluminium foil, I'm not surprised the brass turned black. I hope that is all it did though. I'm not a chemical engineer, so I have no idea what goes on in the chemical process.
Click to expand...

For all I care it can turn the brass pink as long as it removes the bloody primer :)

And US vs Europe? That's a big issue when it comes to various chemicals. You can't buy a lot of the stuff here just because someone in the EU deems a certain compound of a product harmful and you just can't import it :-/ ... and with the stuff that does get imported it's usually under completely different brand names. I just found out that the Tamyia lacquer thinner contains something recently blacklisted by the EU so no mere lacquer thinner for Europe :facepalm.
 
Well ... the oven cleaner didn't work :angry. Took care of acrylics just fine but the primer didn't even budge. I'll try a paint stripper next. I heard that the one from Gunze is pretty good. Oh and the oven cleaner unstuck most of my brass from the hull :behave.

Edit: ok, the primer got somewhat removed ... I'll give it another go ... see you tomorrow Falcon :sleep.

Hope this has a happy ending :).

On a happier note I almost have the cockpit figured out and I managed not to throw out the PE kit out of the window ... because it was closed :love. It's looking pretty good. Hope to post some pictures soon.
 
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After a day of scrubbing and inhaling various chemicals the Falcon is almost as good as new.

Bottom line:

- All of the brass got unstuck by the oven cleaner (lucky for me I didn't put the model together with CA)
- about 30-40 various parts were removed in the process (some on purpose)
- 2 parts got accidentally flushed down the drain (luckily enough I have spares so I don't have to learn to cast my own resin parts)
- roughly a dozen parts were broken so I'll have to repair / create new parts
- bits and pieces of the bent saucer section edges are lost (glued with CA) so I'll have to recreate them with putty

All in all I just want to shoot myself right about now :cry

Hopefully none of this crap is a deal breaker so I'll just rebuild the damn thing and my reward will be: great details that would have otherwise been drowned in primer.

I was wondering when not having any modelling experience whatsoever for the past quarter of a century will slap me in the face ... well here's the first major slap :wacko.
 
Damn it, Mancini, that sucks. A hard lesson and a good warning as I've been priming as I go along. I know you will come back as strong as ever.
 
OK, I think I have finished cleaning the hull. Still need to clean some of the unattached / broken off parts and wiring but that's a walk in the park compared to the amount of work that the hull took. Hopefully both me and the model will get through this and I'll stop my bitching about this incident with this post.

So to show you a glimpse of what had almost cost me my sanity :eek here's a few images...

Oven cleaner power :)
553986_10200131387434163_1023912165_n.jpg

Here's the brass pipes that got unglued by the oven cleaner (right side), the parts that I had to remove or got removed by accident (top left) and the parts that I broke during the cleaning process (bottom left)
384803_10200131387914175_1310597492_n.jpg

... and last but not least here's the cleaned hull. It's not 100% clean as in from the factory brand new clean but I think it will be very ok when primed again. At least I can show off some of the customisations that I didn't get a picture of earlier :).
416804_10200131388314185_917899156_n.jpg
 
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Finally some work in progress images from my cockpit status. I had some time to work on it as the Falcon went out for a swim in oven cleaner :rolleyes.

By using the PE cockpit I found the floor very low and the seats and figures would just sink below the canopy. So I created a rig of sorts that would make the centre console and front seats into one piece. I made it from a piece of the original kit floor and some styrene. I still have to make something to elevate the back seats but that should be easy enough...

Also I decided to light the centre console so I drilled about 20 holes for 0.25mm fibres. Not a very good picture but lighting somewhat visible ... woot

407646_10200132269576216_820751364_n.jpg

... and here's a picture of the painted rig and seats

603997_10200132269296209_741110205_n.jpg
 
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I also started to make some pictures of the battle damage that I've been adding. On the following image you can see small blast marks which I made with my dremel and the other fairly obvious "dent" which I copied from the 5 footer. I used my scribe tool to separate the individual panels and then used the dremel on the inside of the model to make the styrene almost paper-thin which allowed me to easily shape it to the desired look. Reinforced it with layers of putty, and sanded/polished as needed. I'm fairly happy with how it turned out :).

554106_10200132269856223_1870067174_n.jpg
 
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Looking awesome! Wish I had used some FO to do the console, but I built it in such a way that I can still take her apart if I love yours too much:love. As for your crumpled panels breaking off during my build some of mine broke as well so I was glueing and sanding and filling all the way up to primer. Power through and you'll have a great display piece. Someday I'm gonna have to paint the bottom of mine! Keep up the great work! Oh by the way I did raise my back seats up a but using some cylinder stock, they are on swivels in the movie:lol.
 
Well, it seems that after several months of hating myself for the primer catastrophe I'm ready to continue with the model and actually enjoy it :facepalm.

Just to briefly let you know how things are moving, here's a few pictures:

398051_10200637207199341_758303426_n.jpg
A shot of the cleaned and repaired hull. Overall I had to repair around 70 individual parts and fix various places with putty. I'll probably continue with the repairs after the initial primer coat but hey, at least I'm moving forward instead of the other direction.

398004_10200637209679403_908795313_n.jpg
Here's a detail of a part of the hull where you can see quite clearly the amount of customisation, and detail level of battle damage which I copied quite accurately from the 5-footer.

316922_10200637305401796_1470823911_n.jpg
The front of the ship where you can see the scribed "lip" separating the saucer section from the rest of the hull.

... well so much for the hull cleaning/repairing. I'm aware that I'm still going to have to repair with putty / sand various parts of the hull after the primer coat but that's ok. Hopefully after the base coat the damage I made to the model by removing the primer will not be visible as I wasn't able to clean/polish some parts of the model, especially the tail section.
 
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