Built a fair amount of just about everything and anything over the years ..
.. in static display, plastic models, a great seam filler I tried that worked exceptionally well is just your basic white-out ... brushes on, dries, sands amazingly well with light strokes that even leave the cast in rivets .. worked very well on some kits I built that were basically crap for fit long ago.
I don't have the pix anymore of R/C Spit I built when I was at Udorn .. had it sitting in front of a revetment with alla flightline paraphenalia behind it, setup field of view so it looked like it had just been rolled out of the revetment .. people who saw the pix thought it was a real plane
The F-4g Wild Weasel you did looks like it just came off the paint rack ..they never looked that good for more than a few days. Phantoms were like old Harley's .. they leaked everywhere
A note on the 'shiny' ones you see in pix here an there .. was at a flightline photoshoot one fine day, workin the bird next door. Crewcheif comes along, wipes brake fluid all over the side of the plane next door ..they setup the camera, the flight crew (rotating home, so hadda do 'the fighter jock pose') showed up .. everyone laffin about the 'shiny' F-4 .. cheif said it was goin to the paint shop the next day anyway .. LOL.
Had a good friend who told me I got the colors a bit off on one of my models .. we had the chance to look at the National Guard F-16's one fine day .. before we rounded the corner of the hangar I asked him to look close and let me know which Viper was the correct color .. they had 8 of 'em all in a row .. each a different shade of gray with each radome different shades of dark gray, green, and one in a dirty grey white. All depends on time spent in the hangar, weather flown thru, etc. No two ever look identical
It gets even worse if they're flown in combat .. appearance takes a very distant back seat to performance. They load 'em an fly 'em till they break, fix it ..then fly 'em some more.
Had one F-4e that had gone thru heavy weather ..none of the leading edges had any paint left on 'em, markings were barely discernable.. they flew it like that until the 'incident' was over.
-GE
