How do you keep an all black aircraft from looking all black? Easy. Don’t paint it black. John used several shades of dark grey to add interest to the color scheme of his 1/48 Tamiya F-117.

When I was a kid, my friend Troy got the first air brush I had ever seen; a Paasche H. But I digress.

The resin project I had been working on had been inching its way to completion for over two years. It sat there, painted and decaled, waiting for me to scratch build some landing gear, but I didn’t wanna. It would wink at me as I walked by as if to remind me of what a sissy I am. I would look at the floor as I passed, not wanting to make eye contact and let it know how ashamed I was, but it knew.

To redeem myself I turned to Tamiya and their super easy to build kits. The Tamiya 1:48 F-117 comes in a big box and since space is at a premium, it was a prime target for my next project.

While the F-117 is an interesting subject, its paint scheme leaves a little to be desired. That’s a whole lot of black. The famous flag scheme seemed like a great way to keep my F-117 from looking like a big chunk of obsidian on sticks. When Cutting Edge came out with their mask and decal set for this paint scheme, I also noticed this set included panting instructions for a grey version of the same aircraft while wearing the red, white and blue belly. What better way to not have a black plane then painting it grey? I bought the decal set.

The famous flag clad F-117 is FSD-3 with production number 79-782. Ship 782 made its first flight on December 18, 1981 and was used for acoustics and navigation system testing. Seven-eighty-two was painted with the flag pattern for a brief fly-by for the official unveiling of the super secret F-117 to high-ranking officials, including Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger, during an F-117 test force change of command ceremony at Groom Lake.

John used the Cutting Edge mask and decal set to create the flag scheme on the bottom of his F-117.

With all the excitement about a grey F-117, how did my model end up black? After doing a little poking around, I was unable to find any evidence that this airframe was ever grey. In addition to no evidence, it just doesn’t make sense to me that they would paint the bottom of a gray airplane with a temporary paint job, repaint and stencil the top half black, only to go back and repaint the bottom black after one short flight. Meteor Productions states in the flag mask and decal set that they have photos proving that the plane was gray while the underside was red, white a blue. Maybe they do, but they aren’t making them public. I’ll believe it when I see it.

Because I like to use resin cockpits to compensate for my lack of scratch building skills, I ordered the Back Box cockpit set. The Tamiya cockpit is ok and it might have looked good with a little dressing up, but that would have been work, and work that I am particularly bad at. For me, a really well detailed cockpit is the highlight of any airplane model and shelling out fifteen or twenty bucks to have some else all that hard work for me is a cinch. When I compared it to my references, Black Box got the details right.

The only problem with Black Box getting all that detail right is that the Black Box set represents the production cockpit with all the latest upgrades. The FSD ships had conventional analog instruments and to be completely accurate, I would need to scratch build the instrument cluster. Early on I decided not to do this because it would be really, really hard. Vindication came while I was reading Nighthawk F-117: Stealth Fighter by Alison J. Crickmore. The book made a brief mention that 782 was the fist ship to get the digital cockpit. There is, I’m sure, a world of difference between 782’s cockpit and the Black Box version, but at least now I didn’t have to feel lazy.

The visors on the instrument coaming were created from copper sheet. The decals were made from yellow stock with black stripes made on John’s ink jet printer.

This is my fist modern jet model. I find that the modern ones have a lot of junk in the cockpit. The billions of little switches and knobs take hours to paint and require a lot of patience and a steady hand. No small feat when you’re in detox. I slopped the thing with paint for what seemed like weeks but all that detail makes the finished cockpit look nice.

Cramming the cockpit in the F-117 was rather easy. Since the F-117 is basically a pyramid, I did not have to do a lot of grinding of sidewalls and what not. There is some cutting of the plastic required and I ended up removing too much material and the fit became a bit lose. I used strip styrene to rebuild the cockpit sills that I obliterated. To glue in the cockpit, one needs to install the FLIR first, as parts of the cockpit will prevent this from going in after the cockpit is installed. I made sure that it was masked really well and clean on the inside.

One area that I found a bit troublesome was the resin instrument console. It was hard to know how it was supposed to sit in the fuselage. I think I got it slanted up a little too much because it looks like the pilot would have to stand up to look through the HUD. Maybe they have to do that. I don’t know. I’m not a pilot. Anyway, in the end the cockpit looks pretty good. Lots of texture and sparkly bits always look convincing.

Tamiya did a great job on this kit with one notable exception. I figure they must have measured airframe number 781 that is on display at the USAF Museum, Wright-Patterson AFB. This plane has had the RAM removed showing all the aircraft’s panel lines that would be normally covered and smoothed over by this coating. All of these lines were cleanly and crisply reproduced on the kit. Nice work but too bad. I decided to fill these. I tired using the finger nail polish remover - green putty method. I found this somewhat effective at eliminating most of the clean up but it would have required a second application. Next I used super glue. No matter how hard I tried, the super glue left raised areas where the seam line used to be. I figured that the green putty would be easier to work with, so I just did it the old fashioned way. I smeared it on and let it dry. It seems that I did not let it dry enough for after applying a primer coat, the putty had shrunk and left faint panel lines. Very frustrating. It was about this point I got some sage advice. Don’t fill the panel lines. “But I have to fill the panel lines, they aren’t accurate.” Then I looked at the bottom half of the fuselage. It has five times the panel lines of the top half. Ok, I don’t need to be accurate.

The Black Box cockpit provides excellent and accurate detail for an operational F-117. Without proper references for 782, John made no modifications to the Black Box cockpit.

Something clicked at that movement. If I was not going to be accurate with the panel lines, why did I have be accurate about anything else? What else could I do if I decided not to be accurate? I decided a little fun and add interest to the model buy combining various images I had seen involving several of the FSD F-117s.

I used spray paint for the bright colors of the flag pattern on the bottom of the model. This was particularly attractive since Tamiya molded most of this kit in black plastic. The thought of covering all that black with white via an airbrush was not appealing. Not many colors are harder to cover with white, than black.

I had an illegal can of Halfords white primer but to extend its life, I used Citadel figure spray paint to paint the wells, bomb bay and belly of the model white. I then used the Halfords as a topcoat. This was my first experience with primers and I learned that not all primers are created equal. The Citadel was thick and grainy and clogged a lot of the detail. On an F-117 with bogus panel lines, this is not necessarily a bad thing but some of the details did get a little clogged with the thick primer. The Halfords primer, on the other hand, was smooth and creamy and honestly didn’t smell as bad as the Citadel. That’s important when you paint in bed.

Once the white bits were sufficiently white, I closed up the fuselage. The wells, bays, DLIR and wing light parts had to be installed before entombing them between the fuselage halves. The design of the Tamiya kit is a little unique. They made the fuselage as upper and lower halves with the wings molded into each half. When I first opened the box and saw the large upper fuselage and wing piece, I thought, “huh, I’m already done and I don’t remember starting.” Additionally the seam for the two fuselage halves is about an eighth of an inch in from the edge on the bottom of the aircraft. If you have to do any sanding it won’t dull the nice sharp edges. With the two halves joined, the model has quickly transformed into something that looks like an F-117.

It was time to apply the Cutting Edge masks for the stripe pattern. The fist problem I noticed was that the masks make no accommodation for the open wheel wells and bomb bay. I applied the masks over the openings and used a knife to cut out these sections for later use on the doors. The second problem was that the masks were too short: sometimes by a quarter of an inch. I simply filled the gaps with Tamiya tape. After several gooey blasts with Tamiya red spray paint and time to dry, I masked off the stripes and painted the blue part of the flag pattern, again with Tamiya spray paint.

Although GVU-27s are too modern for the FSD birds, the Tamiya kit bombs were painted red to match photos of ordinance used during F-117 tests.

My reward for taking the easy way out with the spay cans was to get a fair amount of bleeding under the masks. Not a lot, but just enough to make what should have been crisp lines a little soft in some parts. It seems that spray paint gets everywhere. Good thing it’s the bottom of the plane. And you can’t pick it up unless you’re a judge at Nationals, so hands off. Anyway, I learned my lesson about rattle cans.

I masked the bottom of the plane and mixed up an extra special batch of F-117 Black. In general, I think black is not a good color for black. I added three or four eyedropper squirts of AeroMaster Black in to a bottle of AeroMaster RLM 66. I painted the entire uppers with my mixture and then lightened the center of the facets with erratic squiggles of highly thinned RLM 66. I tried to make the highlights run in a streaked pattern that went across the grain of each of the panels. Next, I highlighted (or is it low lighted) the edges of the facets with a thin mixture of black.

One really thoughtful feature that Tamiya included with this kit is a pitot tube protector. The four pitot tubes are molded into the upper fuselage. A “U” shaped guard is molded around them to keep you from sending the pitot tubes flying across the room, never to be seen again. This system worked perfectly until I removed the guard. Leaving it attached during painting would cause you to have to do a little touch up after you remove it, but the attachment points are very small and this should be no problem. I removed it during the paining process and suffered the consequences almost immediately. I broke off the forward pitot tube no less than four times. The first time I reattached it, it went on pretty clean but as I kept breaking it, the join got worse and worse and required some sanding to get a clean finish. I would advise leaving the guard on until the very end.

Since accuracy was no longer an issue, and since I really didn’t have any good photos of the topside of 782, I took the opportunity to add as many variations to the black paint as I could find in my references of other F-117s. There seems to be a wide variety of slightly different colored panels on most all of the F-117s. Very few of these variations were consistent across all of the aircraft in my references. I surmised that repainting and reapplication of RAM causes these irregularities. I chose several of the more dramatic of these and applied them all to my model.

I misted on several coats of Future to gussy up the finish for decals. I used the kit decals where necessary and the Cutting Edge decals for the 782 specific markings. All the decals went on well. The Tamiya decals were slightly thick but after the dull coat, look great.

The platypus tail of F-117s is made of titanium. The kits parts were painted with Model Master titanium with thin coasts of Tamiya red. Greys and tan were added for the exhaust.

Cutting Edge supplied fifty tiny little star masks to use on the blue field of the flag. I considered this for a picosecond and then opted for the large decal of stars that Cutting Edge also provided. While this was much, much easier than trying to position all the star masks, it was not a cakewalk either. I found such a large decal a bit like working with an over cooked lasagna noodle and for about 15 minutes all I could do was fold it and tear it. I must say all the smaller parts were easier to maneuver. I gave the decal a light coat of Micro Sol and as usual it puckered in to a wad. My heart skips a beat every time I see this because I never know if it’s going to lie down correctly. Or maybe it’s my PVCs. In the end the star decal bits laid flat.

Shriveled up decals are never the problem. The thing that I always screw the pooch on is getting decals straight. I always triple check the tail numbers and national insignia and every time something ends up crooked our asymmetrical. This time it was the tail numbers. I was able to soak them and coax them off the model with my X-Acto knife but I tore a couple corners in the process. I just touched them up with paint.

I had noticed that all my careful shading on the black areas of the model had all but disappeared when I applied the gloss coat. I decided to try to recreate some of this effect with the dull coat. I also noticed that depending on what angle you view real F-117s they seem to vary in “flatness.” In an attempt to replicate this effect and bring back some of the shading I had created earlier, I applied my dull coat in rough zigzag patterns and streaks on each panel. This worked pretty well as it lightened and changed the texture where it was applied. I did some touch up work with my F-117 Black and RLM 66 to bring back more of the variation in color.

I then used a folded paper towel to buff out small areas on the black paint by rubbing the paper towel in streaks across the panels. This increased the sheen in that area and further varied the texture of the finish. This is a really simple trick and gets great results. The hardest part was figuring out when to stop.

The landing gear and wheels were given a light wash of future mixed with a little black paint. Unfortunately, in spite of everything I had heard, the future seemed to yellow a little. Oh well. I gave the gear and wheels a couple of light coats of Gunze semi gloss. I hand painted the tires and once dry, I found the ickiest part along the seam on all three wheels, and filed that part flat to add weight to the tires. I touched up the sanded area and then chucked the wheels on a toothpick to rotate them as I sprayed a light coat of dirt on the outside edge of the tires. I finished them with flat.

I used car modeling spark plug wire and aluminum foil to simulate the plumbing and brackets on the landing gear. I ran this to various places on the landing gear. My references couldn’t agree on where each line went so I took my best guess. My grand plan of fully plumbing the wheel wells and bomb bay had long since evaporated so I only made the landing gear hydraulic lines continue up as far as the actual strut. If you look directly into the wheel wells, the plumbing just sort of ends. Remember, you aren’t allowed to pick up the model.

John used aluminum foil and car model spark plug wire to plum the landing gear. The 782 decal on the front landing gear was printed on John’s ink jet printer.

After the landing gear was attached, I attempted to add the main gear doors and found that doo-hickies that attach the doors to the fuselage don’t fit when you have the gear connected. I snipped off the connectors and just had to be a little more careful on the alignment of the doors. I then used thin plastic rod as connectors between the gear and doors.

The platypus tail of the F-117 is reddish orange titanium. I masked and painted it Metal Master Titanium. There was literally no orange tint that titanium is so famous for so I over prayed it with some very thin Tamiya clear red. I thought I had over done it a bit but waited to see what it would look like when I applied the exhaust staining. I painted the space shuttle tiles atthe end of the exhaust thin white. Over the black it looked slightly grey. I added layers of black, gray and tan for the exhaust. I thought this was over done as well, and it didn’t really help hide the red I applied earlier. I used a little Windex on a Q-tip to lessen the effect of the acrylic paints and then did some buffing with a Micro Mesh and got a little better result.

A stock F-117 is essentially a black and white aircraft. As I was building and researching, I kept an eye out for little things (besides the big American flag on the bottom) to add interest to the color scheme. With this in mind, and since I was building a semi fictional aircraft by now, I decided to use the kit ordinance and paint the bombs with red bodies. There are several photos of FSD F-117s using bombs like this for tests. I have no evidence that 782 was ever used for this purpose and I am certain that it never dropped anything while painted with the flag, not to mention that the Tamiya kit GVU-27s are too modern, but it looks cool. One minor problem here is that the lenses for the bombs are of the same smoked clear plastic as the canopy. I believe, but am not sure, that the lenses are clear, but the smoked clear plastic is not too noticeable.

The photos I have seen of the FSD aircraft dropping the red, test bombs had black stripes on the bomb bay doors used to help the developers see how the munitions were separating form the aircraft. From the grainy color photos, it appears that the door were not white but some sort of grey green. I decided to use RLM 02 Field Grey. I painted the doors black and then used thin strips of tape to mask off the black lines and then sprayed the doors with the Field Grey. The paint bled a little but I figured that the doors were on the bottom of the model and would be obscured by the big two thousand pound bombs.

The canopy presented an interesting challenge. The FSD F-117 canopies did not have the serrations of the operational aircraft. These would have to be removed from the kit canopy. The serrations on the edge of the canopy could just be filed off but the serrations on the inside edges of the frames required that I sand the canopy smooth. With the original canopy frame lines in place, I applied Tamiya tape and cut a mask to the original window shapes. I stuck the masks to a piece of sheet styrene for safekeeping and sanded all the detail off the canopy. I used sanding sticks, toothpaste, a Micro Mesh, a cheese grater and lots of Future to polish out the canopy. I did notice that I had removed so much material that the canopy was now too narrow for the cockpit sill. Fortunately I would be modeling the cockpit open.

What I should have done, and didn’t, was to have all the Black Box parts for the inside of the canopy fitted and finished before I did any work on the canopy. As it was, I didn’t address these parts at all until I had the canopy painted. This caused me to do quite a bit of rough handling of the canopy and I had to touch up a lot of nicks and dings after I had all the parts put together. It looks ok now but is not as “Future fresh” as I would like.

I put aside the canopy and added the final details to the cockpit. The Tamiya HUD is terrible so I cleaned up the Black Box HUD side pieces and cut clear plastic to go between them.

I wanted to have the visors that hang over both sides of the instrument console folded back over the coaming. It would be a shame to have all the detail on the expensive cockpit covered up. The Tamiya parts were not designed to fold back so I cut some new ones out of copper sheet. I painted them black and printed black and yellow striped decals for them on the ink jet printer. Since the yellow on the decal I printed was translucent and all but disappeared on the black paint, I found some yellow strips on a decal sheet and then printed the diagonal black lines to go across the yellow. This worked well.

Burnishing with a folded paper towel helped add some variation of color and sheen to the all “black” airframe.

One other decal that I need that was not provided by Cutting Edge was the call number that can be seen on the front landing gear strut. I didn’t have a vintage photo of this number so I chose a font that matched the same number on operational F-117s – black, sans serif. Only after I finished the model did I find a photo that showed this number on this aircraft when it was in operation – red, serifed, of course.

I built new canopy struts from plastic rod. I drilled out the bottom ends of the struts and glued in a one-inch piece of copper wire for a handle. I painted them Alclad II Silver and then buffed them out using SNJ sliver powder. After painting, I trimmed the wire handle down to about one millimeter to act as a fastening pin. Attaching the canopy was tricky, as it required gluing and aligning five different points at the same time. I glued one end of the struts to the inside of the canopy and then attached the other ends to the inside of the cockpit. At the same time I tacked the back of the canopy to the fuselage and held the whole mess together with tape while I blew myself hypoxic drying the glue. Somehow, while doing this, I managed to get a small speck of glue on the canopy. Dang. I decided to leave it.

After attaching and reattaching the broken pitot tube, I found myself looking for things to do. Seems to me that’s how all these projects end. I don’t really finish, but can’t find anything I haven’t done. I did manage to get my greasy finger prints on the model a couple of times that required that I clean and even repaint that area but that doesn’t count.

The model was finished just in time to show it in the 2004 Kickoff Classic. Quite surprisingly it won first place in the two jet engine – 1/48 and larger category. Not as surprising is that it also won the stars and stripes special award. It might not have been the best model with stars and stripes on it, but it did have the most stars and stripes. The model also won first place at the Region 9 contest in Fresno.

While this is not Tamiya’s best engineered kit, and offered a few more challenges than I was expecting (although most of those were self-inflicted), it was a lot of fun to build and I think it looks neat. It was fun trying to get an all black model to be visually interesting.

John used zig-zaging patterns of flat clear to replicate the irregular sheen of actual F-117s. He then buffed parts of the finish with a folded paper towel.

I would like to thank Chris Bucholtz, Greg Plummer and Roy Sutherland for their help (whether they were aware they were helping or not) with his project.

Funny story: The first place plaque from the Kickoff Classic fell on top of the F-117 in my curio cabinet and broke off both tail fins. Lip smacking irony, isn’t it? I’m sure I deserved it.