Hot Babe of the
Week is courtesy of Gabe Pincelli. Some landing gear detail photos
for all of you in preparation of the Kinetic T-45A/C
offering.
We continue to work feverishly over here in
preparation for the 2012 IPMS National Convention. By now, most of
you have seen the Youtube video that we have posted that preview our
special product that is exclusive to the convention.
Twobobs OPFOR
RevealMultiple aircraft schemes and the EW pods to go
along with them are all part of this set. The pod detail in a word
is simply amazing and Mike Reeves over at Twomikes did an absolutely
fantastic job on those. These were modeled in 3-D CAD to exact
specifications so you can be sure that these are completely accurate
to the 3rd decimal point. Just amazing quality..... This item is a
limited release item that is only available to folks who attend the
IPMS National Convention. I see through my E-mail and web traffic
that lots of you are already networking with friends to have them
pick one of these up for you at the show. It doesn't seem like these
will last very long.
T-45A/C News: As announced last week,
yes indeed we are working with Kinetic on the kit decals for this
upcoming kit release. This has been a long time coming and we've
been collaborating with Kinetic for quite some time.
Back
about a year ago, Gabe Pincelli and Mike Reeves over at Twomikes
were in the middle of mastering a bunch of resin conversion pieces
for a T-45 Upgrade kit for the slew of BAE Hawk kits that had come
out. For any of you who have been up close to the T-45, you can
appreciate how big of a job this was going to be since there are
some VERY large fundamental differences between the Goshawk and the
Hawk; not the same airplane.
Towards the tail end of the
exercise, Jose "Fuji" Ramos communicated to me that Kinetic was
interested in doing a new tool T-45 kit. Fuji asked if I thought
there would be an interest in this release and of course the answer
was "absolutely"! At that point I enlisted Gabe Pincelli and Mike
Reeves into the project and between Gabe, Mike, Fuji and myself,
we've been working with Kinetic for close to a year now providing
research and proofing of their 3-D CAD drawings, tooling and test
shots.
Gabe Pincelli is really the guy that all of you owe a
Jack and Coke and a pat on the back to. An absolutely fantastic
modeler and also a T-45 pilot, Gabe provided some very exacting
reference assistance and feedback to Kinetic to make sure they got
this kit right. All of his efforts were realized about 4 months ago
when Kinetic sent me their first 3D models and also a resin "test
shot" in the mail. Gabe scoured over these and provided even more
feedback to finalize all the tiny little tweaks that were required
to make the kit just right. After about a week worth of examination,
the CAD files were given approval by Gabe, Mike and I and Kinetic
proceeded on cutting tooling for a plastic test shot.
I'd
love to be able to provide you with some images of these 3-D files
because they truly are impressive. Using these files and the line
art provided by Kinetic has put us on a sharp production curve as
far as getting the kit and aftermarket decals done for this
impending kit release. Even though we have a lot of work done with
these decal files, they still need to be sized and adjusted for the
actual kit and we should be receiving our test shot in the next week
or so. We'll adjust all of our artwork at that point and send those
files in to print.
The subject of the kit decals you'll see
soon enough (I'll defer to Kinetic to announce this) and the
aftermarket decals will be right on the heels of this kit release.
We also plan on a special release boxing here at Twobobs of this kit
that will have a limited release decal scheme as part of the boxing.
More to come on that soon. Timeline for the Kinetic kit release is
TBD but you can expect it in weeks vs months.
Pretty excited
about this release. Between Gabe, Fuji, Mike and myself, we've got a
lot of sweat equity in this project and we're very confident that
both Kinetic as well as you modelers are going to be very happy once
this kit is on the shelves. It's going to be a nice
one!
Below you can see a small snipet of line art that I've
been working to during our decal creation. I purposely chose the
main landing gear view just to show you the amount of detail that is
both in the kit and the line art that we're working to. Good
stuff!!
One last
tidbit of news on the decal front (sort of) is some work we just
finished doing for BAE/UK this last week. BAE Systems/PLC will have
three very large F-35B models on display at this years Farnborough
Air Show. I collaborate often with our fine brothers and sisters
over in the UK as part of my day job and they are all fans of
Twobobs over there. BAE needed some decals for their models and we
were more than happy to oblidge. With the kind of reference material
that was provided to me (engineering drawings of the stencils and
placement) you can bet that these were done exactly to specification
and will look great on their models when finished. If any of you are
going to Farnborough this year, swing by the BAE booth to see these
models!
