Skinny Mike's YF-23 Black Widow

[Skinny_Mike]

Time to stat up a second build for this great cause. My T-38 is assembled and ready to go to paint in the morning. I’m going to take it a little bit slow with the paint work, so to keep me occupied I pulled another kit from the stash and made a second donation to this worthy cause. B)

Sticking with the Northrop theme, I decided on the 1/48 scale Hobby Boss YF-23.

For those that don’t know, the YF-23 was Northrop’s entry into the USAF’s Advanced Tactical Fighter competition, against the Lockheed Martin YF-22. Lockheed’s entry eventually won and today we have the F-22. Two prototype YF-23s were built for the flyoff, PAV-1 (Dark Gray) and PAV-2 (Light Gray) (Photo from YF-23.net).

Both aircraft still exist today and I have been lucky enough to have seen both. PAV-1 is located at the USAF museum in Dayton Ohio and PAV-2 was on display at the Northrop Grumman facility in El Segundo, Ca. before being moved to the Museum of Flight in Torrence, Ca.

There is virtually no aftermarket sets for this kit. The only thing I am aware of is a set of Caracal Models Decals for PAV-1 and PAV-2. The kit comes with fictitious markings for an operational aircraft. The decal set comes with enough decals for both airplanes and are printed by Cartograf. I’m planning to do PAV-1, nicknamed “Gray Ghost” and sporting the black widow marking on the belly.

Time to embark on another adventure!

I haven’t seen many of these kits built, so for anyone that’s interested, here are the sprue shots.

There is also a clear sprue, but its wrapped in foam and I don’t want to remove it until I get to that point. As you can see there really isn’t much to this kit. So I hopefully can get this one done by the end of February too. I plan to keep it pretty out of the box. I may add a Quickboost seat and I’ll probably do something about the blanked off intakes and exhausts, but otherwise it’ll bee OOB again.

Cockpit will start in the morning.

Mike

 

[moon puppy]

Cool! Another great fighter that never was.

 

[Brokeneagle]

 

[JSteinman]

 

[Sharkmouth]

OK, perhaps I should change my swim trunks?

Is there a view of the belly with the spider?

Regards,

 

[Skinny_Mike]

Is there a view of the belly with the spider?

Regards,

Here you go

 

[lupanzer]

... hope to see a great work :coolio

Luiz

 

[Duke Maddog]

Looking good! I'll be watching this one.

 

[helios]

Always liked that bird better than the F-22. The YF-23 looks like a proper interceptor. B)

 

[jknaus]

Neato. Ima watchin
James

 

[Skinny_Mike]

Always liked that bird better than the F-22. The YF-23 looks like a proper interceptor. B)

Yeah - that was exactly why the air force didn't buy it. The days of the interceptor were over, they wanted a proper fighter. Another case of Northrop building what they thought the AF wanted, not what they were asked for :smack

 

[Skinny_Mike]

Thanks for all the interest folks. I hope to keep you entertained and have an end product worthy of the interest.

Briefly started on this yesterday. Nothing worth showing yet, but momentum is building.

 

[Skinny_Mike]

Hey everyone! Sorry its been so long since I put up the teaser for this build. Fortunately I have made quite a lot of progress and hope to have it ready for paint by the end of this weekend. Alright – enough talk, lets show some progress.

Like everything else, this kit starts with the cockpit. The kit cockpit is very well detailed. I feel it rivals most resin cockpits, which is nice considering how much is on display even with the canopy on. It seems pretty accurate as well based on my reference photos. The shelf in the back and the area behind the seat however, I am unable to find good references on so I can’t say, but I believe the shelf area is probably not accurate as there is a bottom area cover that fits to the bottom of the canopy, similar to the F-15 canopy, and that is not included in the kit and would likely interfere with what is represented.

The ejection seat unfortunately isn’t very good. I am going to replace it with a Quickboost seat from an F-15. Dimensionally they line up pretty well and the detail on the resin seat is much better. The YF-23s used an ACES II seat that had the same angles as the F-15 ACES II seat anyway so I am staying fairly accurate. The mount for the kit seat on the cockpit floor will need to be modified and the seat rails will need to be scratch built later.

Here is the painted cockpit. I used the reference photos on YF23.net to paint it as close as I could. I used Ammo paints for the gray and the yellow primer and a variety of acrylic paints for the rest. One quick note, as standard practice at Edwards, and I’m sure most other flight test outfits, anything painted orange is instrumentation used by the flight test team for data collection. I represented that where following my references.

And the IP

Next step was the nose gear well. The floor of the cockpit makes the roof of the gear well. Hobby Boss made each wall of the bay separate which made detail painting much easier. The white is Ammo paints again with. I gave the bay a wash of faded gray oil paints, sprayed on a satin coat and then picked out the details.

Again, the detail all seems pretty accurate. And here it is assembled.

And installed. The instructions called for 20g of nose weight. I weighed out 30g just to be safe and added that to the nose as well. I was careful about dry fitting the weight and the fuselage top, to make sure I wouldn’t have any issues later.

Next step was the main landing gear bays. After looking at my references I found the bays were a combination of gloss white, zinc chromate yellow primer, unpainted steel and naked carbon fiber. Ah – prototypes, what are you going to do? Fortunately the walls are all separate pieces again which made the task a little easier. The wells were quite time consuming though, it took about a week to get them finished.

The white and the zinc chromate is again Ammo paints. The carbon fiber is decal sheet, cut to shape and the steel is MM Steel. Here are the bays assembled.

And here they are installed.

In the mean time I also worked on the wings and the tails. They are made of top and bottom halves and the wings leave a seam on the bottom that needs some attention. I filled the seam with putty, leaving a gap where the panel lines would need to be rescribed.

After sanding the putty I filled the gap at the panel lines with superglue. Sanded, polished and re-scribed the lines. Turned out pretty well. For some reason after a primer coat and some putty/sand/repeat, there are still some ghost lines that I can’t figure out. But they are on the bottom so I am done worrying about them.

Next step, intakes. I hate intakes. And these were going to be a pain. The intakes are in two halves and have some interesting geometry. They are also blanked off at the rear.

First thing I was going to do was open up the end and put in an engine face. Turns out, once installed that end is pretty invisible so I decided to leave it be. I also chose to only work the seam at the front of the intake because there is no way I can figure out to get it all. I also painted the insides in gloss white before I assembled the intakes. Then it was just a game of putty sand repeat until I got something I was happy with. Once the seams were taken care of I took a quick look at my reference photos and I discovered that the intakes were actually not white but were the same color as the exterior of the plane. (Both photos are from YF23.net)

This seemed very odd to me. I figured it was just an artifact of the restoration. I ended up asking my lead at work, who was with the company when these planes were flying, if he remembered what color the intakes were. He wasn’t sure but told me that the prevailing driver at the time was low observability so anything that helped keep the airframes invisible to radar or the naked eye was employed. White intakes would have been visible from a was away, so it quite probable they were painted to match the airframe. I sprayed them in Ammo’s FS36118 Medium Gunship Gray to match the exterior of the airplane.

And installed them in the bottom of the fuselage.

The seams around the front also needed to be cleaned up. So after some more PSR we got to this.

This is where we are today. A lot of this work was done out of order while I was working to finish the T-38 or waiting on paint to dry. All that is left is the exhausts and then I can close up the fuselage, add the wings and head off to paint. Hopefully I won’t wait so long for the next update!

One other thing to note. I mentioned in the first post that PAV-1 was called the gray ghost. This is actually wrong, it was called Spider. PAV-2 was called the gray ghost. Apparently when the nicknames were added to the gear doors after the program was over, whomever did it mixed them up. :facepalm If i add that marking, I will probably make the correction on the kit.

Thank you all for following! As always, questions and comments are welcome!

Mike

 

[Iron Mike]

 

[Sharkmouth]

Building momentum, I see!

Regards,

 

[moon puppy]

 

[ausf]

B)

 

[jknaus]

James

 

[ij001]

All progess is good progress, Mike. Following closely.

Ian.

 

[phantom II]

Good progress Interesting how Northtrop keeps loosing out to Lockheed.

Cheers, Christian B)