B-58 Hustler Italeri 1:72

The sign arrived today - and I can finally call this finished! 

Display nearly finished. I'm just waiting for an engraved sign to arrive. 

The final result! The patch is a replica and was bought on ebay. I think this calls for a proper display base - which I plan to build next. 

Once more some heavy masking was involved to paint the black areas on the wing-engine pylon joints. 

The filled in area will later be painted black (as on the original plane). That makes things a lot easier. 

Did it hurt to scrape off the NMF to fix the inner engine pods? Absolutely! 

Decals completed! Thanks Thomas for sharing the USAF lettering with me! 

One side completed, the USAF lettering still missing. It's printed in dark blue (like the roundels) on the Fox One sheet. This would indeed be correct when you look at the official painting specs for the Hustler. However, in real life the USAF lettering seems to have been painted in black most of the time. 

Not staged at all 😄 

The pod number was put together from digits of several serial numbers from the Fox One sheet. 

Starting to look the part 🙂 

Alclad II Airframe Aluminium was used for the first NMF layer. 

Alclad II gloss black primer was used to prepare the model for the Alclad II metal colours. 

In the meantime I started with the MB-1 pod and decided to depict it in an red and white test-scheme. 

The yellow part is the pointed nose of a Revell Fiat G.91 from the spares box. Now it represents the tail cone of an early Hustler. 

As I won't show an open cockpit I can live with what's in the box. Only the three seats have been swapped for parts from the spares box as the early Hustler I want to depict didn't have the capsule ejection seats jet. 

There was a nasty gap at the rear which I tried to close with some stretched sprue. Let's see how this turns out after some sanding.