1/32 Kitty Hawk North American F-86D Sabre Dog

Gallery Article by Steve Negley on Sept 14 2017

 

      

Well I haven't posted here for awhile, I've been busy buying a house and retiring the last 18 months. I've been busy lately though at my modeling bench so I got interested in this F-86D I started months ago. It wasn't the fantasy build I thought it was going to be that's for sure and I think that's why I lost interest in it the first time maybe. There is lots of filing and cutting off locating pins. For the most part things fit together ok. I used all the Eduard aftermarket cockpit stuff that was available all the rest is OOB.

Click on images below to see larger images

The kit decals have a flat finish which seemed odd to me especially since it is a NMF for the paint. I never had any good luck with flat finish decals over NMF surfaces, the stenciling always looks real bad with the flat finish so I looked for some aftermarket decals. Found some that Zotz makes.....no stenciling.....I ended up spraying some clear gloss over the kit decals and that helped, also helped that the kit decals turned out not to be to bad of quality.

The paint is Alclad II over light gray acrylic lacquer primer. I applied a generous coat of Alclad Duraluminum then sanded those first coats with 1000 grit wet and dry paper. The final coat of duraluminum was applied then I used some Alclad Semi Matte Aluminum and Stainless Steel to shade the various panels of the wings and fuselage. I used a color scheme off the kit decals. After the decals were applied I washed all the rivets and panel lines with black a water base acrylic to bring out the panel line and rivet detail. 

Steve Negley

Photos and text © by Steve Negley