As I promised, My green rainmaker, Slipstream, would be a sorta re-shelled Seeker jet. I realize we now have Acidstorm coming out, but I have had this one since November-December last year. As you'll see, they're significantly different enough that its all good.
First, I had an extra Starscream from over a year ago, and as I said in Microburst's thread, I'd gotten these originally to make the other seekers, but thanks to BotCon 07 I didn't have to. So I decided to have some fun. I took a model kit, 1:100 scale, of an FA-18 Super Hornet and set to work.
I ground the crap outta Starscreams 4 wings. I made their diameter smaller, and more importantly, I made them much, much thinner. I then cut the model's wings off and drew an outline of the new SS wings, and ground them down equally thin inside this outline so the wing would sit down inside this cutout, so that A) the overall thickness would be the same as original, and B) this would allow me to use the screw holes and nullray pegholes from SS and have much better structural integrity compared to just simply glueing the new wings onto the edge of the wing joints. I then chopped off the vertical tails. This allowed room for the larger rear wings to fit, plus a FA-18 doesn't have its tails outside the body like that.
I then cut grooves in the proper locations on the backs of the legs for the model kit's tail tabs to fit down inside and glued these in place. Then I ground down the shoulder-pylons/air intakes and chopped off this portion of the model kit and glued them into place. I re-shaped the bottom side to still look good and be symmetrical as well. Last thing I did was used the tiny space between the forward screw and where the tab the head swivels on, and drilled a hole up the bottom of the fuselage, below the cockpit, to let me peg in the model's forward landing gear.
After all this was done, I used Apoxie Sculpt to clean up a few areas of work, and then I sanded all the areas that would have rubbing from paint applications, and disassembled it. I then dyed the knees, forearms, hands, and feet. I used the brand new Testors One-coat Lime Ice for the main color of green, Testors silver for the stripes, and a few spots of Testors Gold metal-flake. I masked off the stripes, but I painted them by hand. The paint was just BARELY more yellowish than what I was wanting, so I went back after I clearcoated it and gave him a paint wash of Testors green, then clearcoated the sucker with Testors One-coat Wet Look clearcoat. I hope you guys like it!!
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