Hey everyone, time to catch everyone up on this build. Its actually been done for about a week now, but I was lazy about getting up the last post.
Thank you all for your encouragement with the decals. Unfortunately I didn’t take any pictures of the fight but here’s a quick run down of what happened. Once the flat coat was on, the decals showed some pretty brutal silvering. To solve this, I spent about a week hitting each of the offending decals with two coats of Walther’s Solvaset a day (one before work and one after work). This had a staining affect on the paintwork underneath, at least on the flat coat. I shot a couple heavy coats of Future over the stained areas and this cleaned it all up. Last step was a flat coat with Ammo’s Flat Varnish. In the end 98% of the silvering is gone. I am really happy I could save it.
Moving on. All that was left was the undercarriage. I started with the wheels. The prototype aircraft used a nose wheel taken from the F-15 and mains taken from the F-18. Unfortunately the kit wheels are not accurate at all. I replaced them with aftermarket wheels from Royale Resin. They where then painted in the standard fashion, Ammo Tires and Rubber for the tires, Vallejo White for the wheel hub followed by a dark wash. Here is the aftermarket wheels next too the kit wheels, and the finished wheels.
The biggest issue is the nose wheel. Its really much larger then it should have been. This has resulted in the NLG strut being too large at the wheel mount. And the Royale Resin wheel would not have looked right. Fortunately the guys at SAC came to the rescue. From what I have been told, the SAC products are just white metal casts of the kit parts. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but the set for the YF-23 was advertised as “corrected” so I picked on up. The MLG legs look to be the same as the kit parts, but the nose gear leg is defiantly different. It at least corrects the wheel mount. The gear where primer with automotive primer and then painted in white.
Unfortunately I forgot to take a comparison photo of the two nose gear struts. The nose gear had some patches of red on them. This was used for data collection and experimental parts. I replicated this based on my reference photos.
The gear doors were also finished and everything was installed without any drama. I corrected the labeling issue on my build and used the Spider decal on the inside of the nose gear door. These radio call signs were added to the doors when the two airplanes went to their respective meusems, and they were mixed up so not PAV-1 is labeled as the Gray Ghost and PAV-2 is labeled as Spider IRL.
I also painted the pitot tubes in Alclad Steel and installed them. Once the gear had cured, I flipped her over and set it on the shelf.
Well there you go, I had a lot of fun building this kit. And thanks to everyone for all the encouragement along the way, especially during that silvering incident!
Mike
The worst being the US AIR FORCE decals on the sides of the engine pods. I've tried giving them a fresh coat of Solvaset to see if that helps settle them down a bit, but since they are already futured and flat coated it may not help. We'll see in the morning. If that doesn't work, I've got a second set of decals cued up at Sprue Bros. I'll sand off the offending decals and try to repaint and decal. 
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