Recently Completed:WASP Arrowhead SF Conversion

This was a most enjoyable project, a conversion from a standard jet fighter kit to a design that appeared in the 1962 British animated SF series Stingray. This was the "Arrowhead" Interceptor, as used by the World Aquanaut Security Patrol, a global underwater security service armed with the latest hardware (set in 2065, that meant rockets, nukes, ultra-fast submarines, you name it).

The original studio models were based on Aurora's Northrop N-156 kit, but I chose to use the more available (and better) Hawk kit of the F-5A (now released by Testor), a contemporary of the original. It took a lot of work and many months to complete. Research involved studying the eight shots in which the plane appears in one episode of the show, studying any stills I could find, then rebuilding with care.

I rescribed all the panel lines, performed plastic surgery to swap the order of wings and tail, scratchbuilt a cockpit and added a Hasegawa pilot and True details seat (I used a McDonnell ESCAPAC seat, as the seat used in the F-5A doesn't seem to be available.) The Arrowhead looks clumsy with her gear down, so I did a flight-configuration build, my first model on a stand in thirty years. I raided my scrap box for an old Airfix stand from the early 70s, and floated off the B-17 decal with MicroSet. The lateral tanks were not featured in the Hawk kit, so I found the correct kind of tank in Fujimi's early 1980s F-5A (not as good as Hawk's), and molded it off. These are resin copies. The paintjob is a variety of enamels and acrylics, and the white markings are all painted.

 I used some kit decals and the rest were custom-made using clear film and a laser printer. The wing checks were done that way, and all the stencl data. The scribed panel lines were accented with ProModeller Weathering Wash, and panel differentiation was done with graphite. It was a learning process, all models are, and I know I could have done better, having missed the odd procedural cue (doing things in the wrong order can be the kiss of death), but all in all she came out pretty good.

My Arrowhead appeared in Modelling the 21st Century Vol. 2, recently published by Happy Medium Press in the UK. Follow that link to see their amazing collection of publications for the science fiction hobby world.

Cheers, more soon, TB379