This time it’s Sword’s EE Lightning, a British supersonic jet fighter. I think many people like it because of its unique style.
There are not so many parts. There are many large parts. When I look closely at the small parts, the accuracy of the parts doesn’t seem so high.
There is one large decal sheet, and we can choose between two types of markings. I think red and silver look better. I don’t know what to do.
Pilot seats and an engine nozzle. There were some resin parts in it. It seemed like a part introduction, but the assembly will start later.
(2023/06/05)
This is my first time assembling a Sword kit, and it’s hard. The part accuracy of the injection part is not so high, and it isn’t easy to fit the parts together. I remember having trouble with a Semar kit I made long ago. I guess it’s a rapid injection mold and multi-material kit. There were instructions to put weights in the cone. It didn’t specify how many grams, so I put in as much space as allowed.
Cutting out the resin part of the engine nozzle was difficult, and it cracked a little. I rarely do this kind of work. But the jet engine’s ejection part is nicely molded, and there’s no damage, so I don’t think there’s any problem with a bit of failure.
I planned to paint the cockpit and then build it in. I don’t have that mental luxury, and I’m trying to build it up first to focus on assembling the parts. A lot of clips and handy vises are used to bond the fuselage.
The main wing assembly. This unbalanced kit has smooth and beautiful surfaces but lots of burrs.
(2023/06/06)
I’m worried I can make it well because there will be quite a gap when I lightly build it. I don’t think everything will work out simultaneously, no matter where I adjust.
So I glued them together for the moment, regardless of the gap. The angle of the main wing seems to drop 6 degrees downward. There is a graphic in the assembly manual, so it should be OK if it is about the same. When I adjust the angle, seeing from a distance is easier. I don’t want the angle to drop too much because of the weight of the main wing, so I am standing up and drying the parts.
I haven’t made any progress on the cockpit yet, but I’m working on the canopy. It doesn’t fit very well. It would be better to adjust the canopy when the cockpit panel and top cover are glued together.
I also glued the landing gear and its cover. The underside of the fuselage is all silver, so I don’t think it would be too much trouble to paint it after assembling it. There is no strength at the root of the landing gear, so I made additional holes and reinforced the surroundings with super glue. It looked a little dirty, but I chose strength first. And for the rear landing gear, I think it’s unusual that the main leg angle is slightly forward.
(2023/06/10)
Many projections exist, such as a refueling nozzle for aerial refueling and pitot tubes. Other than painting, I don’t want to handle it too much, but I have to work very carefully for a bit longer because the cockpit painting and canopy bonding are not done yet.
I felt the canopy wasn’t very clear, so I polished it with a compound. I usually build a lot of tanks, so there isn’t much demand for compounds. If the solvent evaporates, the compound will become rusty. It may be time to replace it.
This canopy frame is difficult to mask because it is slightly curved. I cut the masking tape into fine pieces and put it on nicely, but it may not be good enough.
I painted the masking sol, and the canopy is almost ready.
For some reason, our supervisor likes Sword boxes and naps daily. With the temperature rising, he went from sleeping on a cushion to lying on the floor more often.
(2023/06/12)
The pilot sheet used this time has a good mold and is very easy to paint, probably because of the resin parts. Moreover, it is good that it is molded in one piece, with no delicate parts adhesion.
The side-by-side seats are an unusual arrangement for a fighter.
There were no decals on the cockpit panel this time, so I drew as much detail as possible by hand. Even in an actual plane, I think it’s a simple plane with only black and gray without the flashy red and yellow switches.
I glued the canopy. The steps were adjusted to fit the aircraft as much as possible. If this work is hard, it is one reason it takes time to complete the aircraft kit.
The whole area was painted black as a primer. Some areas around the canopy remain black with paint instructions. Masking work seems to be challenging because the aircraft is quite large.
(2023/06/15)
After some hesitation, I made a dark-green and silver fuselage different from the box painting. They say it was an aircraft deployed in Germany. The flight operations area seems mostly on land, so I wonder if they paint it dark green because it flies over forests and fields. I think there are a lot of Green fighter jets in the Russian Army, too.
I don’t think there will be any silver directly on the upper surfaces of the wings, but I think it will be caught in the airbrush airflow, so I masked it properly. As always, this takes a lot more work than airbrush painting.
On the back side is a dark green area with a thin line, so I am masking it.
Stick a lot of narrow-line decals on the top of the wing. This is also good that the decals are thin, but thin decals are hard to handle. Later, when I couldn’t stick it in a straight line, and it got wobbly, I would retouch it with a brush.
(2023/06/17)
When I removed the masking from the canopy, there was a white spot on the inside. I can’t fix it anymore because it’s glued tight. I didn’t use superglue and should have dropped the compound properly, so why? Did some mist get inside the cockpit when I airbrushed the cone? I think the cone part was airbrushed from the front rather persistently. If that’s the case, I’d have to ensure the airtightness of the front of the cockpit before the airbrush, and that risk would be reduced by having the canopy open in the first place, so what do I do? This mistake, which I made quite a bit when I started making plastic airplane models, is rare nowadays. I can only paint the smoke to make it a little less noticeable. A little disappointing.
Despite all the troubles, EE Lightning is now completed. The only supersonic fighter plane developed by the U.K. The movement performance is rated as good, but the armed and electronic armaments and the amount of fuel loaded were rated as insufficient. Other than the U.K., Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait have introduced it. Actual combat experience: Saudi Arabian Lightning carried out a ground attack in the Yemen conflict.
The decals included in this kit were printed by a manufacturer called Techmod. Techmod is one of the leading decal makers in Poland, and I think it is reasonably high quality. On the other hand, even small caution decals tend to wrinkle, so if I don’t keep them on the stand paper properly and bring them to the plane, tragedy is likely to occur. This is obviously for advanced users and is sensitive to handling. It’s thin enough to fit any uneven surface without a strong decal fit.
The armor was equipped with two Firestreak missiles. The Firestreak missile is a first-generation British passive infrared homing air-to-air missile. Is it a missile that tracks infrared radiation emitted from its target? It is said that infrared rays are electromagnetic waves, also called hot rays, because they transmit heat well. In short, it must track the heat of the jet engine’s nozzle. I think it’s primitive, developed in the 1950s.
I thought this Firestreak missile was painted white, but it seems to be a greenish type of aircraft deployed in Germany. I wonder if the dark green in the fuselage made it suitable for that. The missile’s shape in the instruction manual differs from what I put together, but is this correct?
The green cobra and maple troop mark are pretty cool. Also known as Squadron 92 (East India Squadron), it is now known as Squadron 92 Tactical and Training. The unit was founded in 1917, received the Super Marine Spitfire as RAF in the spring of 1940, and is fighting in the Battle of Britain. Reorganized in 1947 after the war, it was redeployed to Germany in 1965. It has been disbanded and reorganized several times since then. This marking refers to the EE Lightning that the unit was deployed to West Germany in 1976.
The dark-green and silver-painted fuselage gives a rather plain impression, so I used white caution marks for red silver coloring. From the top, it was all dark green, so I thought it would be more pictorially interesting to have a change on the fuselage surface with a few seals.
The canopy got a little dirty on the inside, so I thought I’d put some smoke paint on it to make it less noticeable, but somehow the finish is not very good.
I was going to paint the cockpit and then build it in, but I didn’t have the flexibility to do that, so I had to go ahead and paint later to focus on assembling the parts.
There is silver paint on the back, so I wanted to erase the scratches on the surface, if possible, carefully. But there was also a huge gap between the wing and the fuselage, and it was hard enough to fill it up, and like the two Semar airplanes I made in the past, just to get into shape is a blessing.
I forgot to mention that this SWORD kit is a practice plane modified from a regular Lightning to a parallel dual seat. Maybe a bit of a maniac.
The fact that the number of parts is not so large is preferable because it is easy to assemble. However, the problem is that the accuracy of each part is not very good, and there are many burrs, and if I don’t take time to shape it, I can’t put it together correctly. I wonder if the precision of panel lines and other molds is one thing and plastic injection technology is another. Perhaps SWORD is not making much of the 1/48 because this kit didn’t sell as well. Maybe it didn’t sell that well because it’s a multi-seat trainer. I didn’t build it well because I lacked skills, but the 1/48 scale EE Lightning is big and powerful. I enjoyed this second-generation fighter jet I had not made in a long time. I still have another SWORD EE Lightning T5. If my energy continues, I want to try again.
(2023/06/19)
