I've been working on another Fritz the Fox animated cartoon. (If you've never heard of Fritz, you may enjoy his aerial hijinks...follow the link in my signature for a look) This cartoon is a bit of a tribute to creature features of the fifties, so it seemed only natural that it should include one cheesy miniature shot. Fritz's mount in this particular toon is a Twin Mustang of the Alaskan Air Command. In order to make the shot work, I had to come up with a couple of F-82's that I could somehow motorize and crash into an arctic diorama, all within the confines of a budget and amount of space that would not provoke objections from my saner half.
I thought you guys might enjoy a build thread...
The first and foremost challenge was how to model Fritz himself. Most model kits don't include an anthropomorphic Fox that you can put in the pilot seat. Fortunately, I have some friends at Ironwind Metals (formally Ral Partha). They were able to help me mold a 1/72nd scale Fritz the Fox head that I could stick on a pilot figure. I liked the result so much that I had Fritz and his sidekick, Hans, cast in several scales (which I will soon offer as a resin kit for sale on my site). It turns out the biggest expense is the sculptor, so after seeing how it was done, I sculpted Fritz myself. Before I knew it, I had boxes full of resin Fritz parts! Here's a 1/72nd scale Fritz being assembled for themodel. You can see one assembled cockpit with Fritz, and another Fritz awaiting painting. The bag in the background contains the first batch of resin 1/32nd scale heads. Sadly, they had a defect, but the mold is being repaired and the next batch should be ready soon, along with masters of the new pieces. The small heads had a tiny bubble in the nose, as well, which is why the unpainted Fritz has a green nose. I had to sculpt a replacement.
For the aircraft, I chose Monogram's (Revell's) venerable F-82 kit. The challenge with this model is its small size. The only other option was the much-maligned Modelcraft 1/48th scale kit, but it is hard to find, harder to build and harder still to make pretty, so I stuck with the classic. This photo shows the finished cockpits and motors being test fitted. The motors are the smallest ones I could find, from an RC Quadrocopter. They will be powered by a small cell battery in the wing center section, which can be accessed via the plane's ammunition panel. It won't fly, but the motors are adequate to spin the props at several thousand rpm, which will be necessary to get a good prop blur when shooting video at a hundred frames per second.
Fritz's airplane(s) in the paint shop...next up is a bit of weathering and then applying the bare-metal foil for an authentic aluminum finish.
Beginning to apply the bare-metal foil to Fritz's plane...painstaking work, but it couldn't be shinier. The Carson visor in the background has made the task more bearable...I highly recommend one to anyone who does a lot of detail work. There are four different power of lenses you can swap out, and the LED light can be repositioned or even removed and placed wherever.
Sometimes I foil the plane, and sometimes it foils me. The compound curves of the fuselage can be a real challenge. When in doubt, I follow the paneling of the real aircraft. Odds are, if the engineers couldn't get the real aluminum panels to bend that way, then I'm not gonna have much better luck with foil. See the incompletely foiled fuselage in the photo? There are over a dozen pieces of foil on the port side alone. I invented a few new curse words while trying to put the paw print on the tail of the other fuselage, too. Slow going, but it is exciting to see it take shape.
Here's one of the completely foiled planes ready for clearing, decals and weathering. The prop hubs have been installed. This was more challenging than it sounds, since the model's props were not designed to fit on the tiny shaft of the electric motors. I had to cut some 4mm long bits of tiny brass tubing and glue them inside the hub, then somehow mount them to the shaft. My initial effort to glue it on the shaft nearly wrecked one of the engines...a small disaster, given that the motors were now glued inside the fuselage...as the glue ran down the shaft and seized up the engine. Fortunately, I was able to clean it off and try again. The second time around, I used tire balancing putty, which is both very sticky and very likely to stay where you put it. It worked great!
Note the discolored foil around the exhaust stacks: I boiled some aluminum foil with egg shells for about twenty minutes to yield the oxidized metal look, then cut and pasted them on with micro-scales foil glue (which also serves double-duty as a decent canopy glue). I must've cut a dozen of them just to get four good pieces. The ammunition access panel was slightly weathered by painting it with bleach, which took the shine off of it a bit. I'll save the rest of the weathering for after I apply the decals.
I'm waiting for some spray-on acrylic varnish in the mail so I can put on the custom decals. Since the plane must match the one in the cartoon, I obviously cannot use all of the kit decals, so I will be printing my own. Stay tuned to see how that goes...
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