1/285 Scale Saab 105 and Scratch-Built Gun Pods

It took over a month for me to get it, but I finally got my Shapeways order. I'm not going into the ugly details on how many trips it took to the post office, the time spent both on the internet and on the phone to track down the correct shipping number, but for the price you have to pay, you would think express mail would be faster and smoother than good old US mail. 

Among my purchases were two Saab 105 trainers, one of which is shown below:

Saab 105

They were a pain to separate as they have a pretty thick sprue attaching the two planes. Fortunately, the designer put the sprue at the two plane's bellies. I managed to saw them apart with a razor saw without any damage. As you can see, the plane is blue,but that is a superficial layer of plastic. When I cut the sprue off, the plastic below it is white. I'm not sure what the purpose of the outer blue layer is. The surface is pretty frosty, but I think using gesso or Vallejo's brush-on primer might smooth out some of the graininess. 

Why the Saab 105? If you have not figured it out by now, I like obscure weaponry. There were several variants that were modified for ground attack. Although I can't find the source again, I though I read somewhere that some were used during the various wars in the Congo. The model does have hard points. What the 105 doesn't have are built-in guns. Enter the gun pods....

Gun pods. Ruler is scaled for 1/285

These guys are probably the toughest scratch builds I've made so far...probably tougher than the light machine gun I made that cost me a drop of blood. They are made of styrene rods of 2.0mm diameter that I shaped using an emery board and my little chopper. The hardest part was the gun.  The gun is a very thin wire. I bore a hole in the front end of the pod using a small needle that I heated up with a candle flame (the soot is why parts are black and gray). The wire was glued in with CA-glue and it was very tricky trying to get the wire to be vertically and horizontally true. I'm not sure how successful I was. Once secure, I snipped off most of the wire with one of my older sprue cutters. 

They don't represent any specific, real life gun pods. They are definitely not perfect, but once glued to a hard point and painted, they will look ok. I have plenty other ordinance to mount on my Saab 105s like laser-guided bombs, and rocket pods are pretty easy to make.

I'll get pictures up of the planes when finished.