One of my latest two builds is a variant that I had never built but was nonetheless fairly familiar with. The Dog Sabre, which I always associated with cheap visual effects in the old Godzilla movies. I'd built the more famous F-86E several times over my modeling life time (Monogram's old kit as well as the more recent Hasegawa release). The -D entered my stash roughly a decade ago, first the Monogram Pro-Modeler release via eBay, and probably a month or so after acquiring this release, I grabbed the newer 1/32 Kitty Hawk kit.
This was a trouble-free build up until the very last day.* In fact, I had all the internal stuff painted, detailed, and built within a couple of hours, then the basic airframe constructed a day or so later. Then this build essentially sat on my work bench, neglected, while I waded into that Kitty Hawk kit.**
* While I was attaching the drop tanks, one of the anti-sway braces that mounts from the wing to the tank went flying out of my tweezers. I heard it hit something off to my right, but even after clearing everything away from the surface of my workbench, I never did find that little part. So my build features no anti-sway braces.
** Much more to say about the Kitty Hawk kit on the other thread.
Research showed that the Dog Sabre's wings had a lot of tonal variation, particulary with the middle section being a far different tone than the surrounding areas. I was able to get that effect by spraying the entire airframe aluminum, then after that cured and I masked sections off, I sprayed dark aluminum and picked out smaller panels with white aluminum. I used AK Interactive XTreme Metallics paints.
My original intent was to build the boxart kit featuring the "Denace the Menace" artwork. At some point I decided I wanted more color, so I switched gears to the other decal option provided in this kit. The kit gave decals for the three stripes along the fuselage and the rear stripes on the drop tanks, but previous history trying to mix decals with paint told me I'd never match the blue exactly. So all of the blue is Model Master Blue Angel Blue.
Decals went on pretty well, although now I see some carrier film around the stars on the rudder. Should have just cut the stars out and placed them individually. Lots and lots of stencils, enough to drive one insane. I split putting those on over two days.
There is a few ounces of clay stuffed into the nose in front of the cockpit to keep this tail sitter on its gear.
The weathering is a first coating of Mig neutral wash, followed by a mix of various AK Interactive fluids to give the engine area a dirty appearance.