Continued...
I´ve cut of all moving parts from the YF-23 and will position them slightly dropped.
The exhaust was a bit of a challange. The YF-23 has what I guess is some sort of heat absorbing and/or resistant plates on the walls of the exhaust. The plates varies slightly in color and it looks kind of like the bottom of the space shuttle (check out theese pix).
I thought it would look cool to do something like that, so I decided to give it a shot.
First of all, the walls of the exhaust are not very deep, and they don´t touch the floor either. I had to extend them with sheet styrene both inwards and down.
This progress required constant dry fitting. When all four walls was extendend and smooth, I painted it with Moded Master Metalizer exhaust. This would be the first of four different shades in the pattern.
With the first shade painted and dry, I mesured the size of the exhaust "triangle" and looked at several reference photos and drew a scale drawing of the pattern. I then numbered the squares from 1-4 at random. I did the drawing on a large post-it, so the glue strip covers the entire triangle
I then placed a second glue strip under the one with the drawing and then cut out the #2 squares. I then got a template of all the #2 squares
This was repeated for the other numbers and them mirrored for the right side walls. I ended up with 6 different templates.
With the teplate I could paint the first shade. To make it appear more random without cutting more templates, I used different numbered templates for different walls but the same shade (Metalizer gun metal was used with template #2 on wall #1 but with template #3 on wall #2 and so on)
Here´s the second shade painted
And here´s the finihed result. It´s a bit shiny, but I think it will look better after a coat of clear flat. This took many hours to do, and the result isn´t exactly what I hoped for. But it looks somewhat interesting atleast...
Thanks for reading this long story /Johan