Been working on this to get back into modeling again…
The kit itself is not very good to be honest. The panels are really thin and not very deep at all and it’s easy to sand them off. The resin pieces are ok, but fit is not so great. The fit of the plastic parts is horrible. There’s no pins or guides to help fit the pieces together. Since the fit is not very good there’s lots of filler needed. Honestly this is the worst model kit I’ve done so far, which is annoying because the X-15 is insanely cool and deserves a kick ass kit.
Special Hobby/MPM offer difficult to build kits of the X-15 in all major scales (1/72, 1/48, 1/32). But until Tamiya or Hasegawa decide to do one, that’s what we have to work with. Still, the X-15 represents a highly successful test program that probed hypersonic flight, and it looks super-cool. So all that aggravation is worth it in the end.
I have the 1/32 kit in the stash, and it features an ejection seat that looks like flat-packed Ikea furniture. The stabilizers supposedly were dimensioned off of a plan view, making them a bit short, since they angle slightly down. I’m not sure if the 1/48 kit suffers from the same problem, but it is a bugger to fix if you want to do it right.
But you seem to have gotten your model together okay, despite the kits challenges. I look forward to seeing it finsihed!
Off to a good start on modeling Mission 2-43-75, Robert Rushworth’s flight of 3 November 1965. It was the X-15A-2’s first flight with external tanks, but they were empty.
It was kind of a snake-bit flight (as many 'A-2 flights were…) in that the LOX tank was destroyed when its parachute failed to deploy, and the ventral rudder was lost when its parachute also failed.
Keep in mind that before the X-15A-2 was transferred to the USAF museum, North American Aviation scrubbed off the sealant and ablative, a scouring process that caused its own unique brand of (non-flight) weathering and discoloration. Then portions of the aircraft damaged or destroyed on the high-speed run were removed and replaced. After being re-certified to fly, the finished airframe – devoid of all markings – was returned to Edwards in June 1968. But by that time, funding for the X-15 program was winding down and NASA had no interest in flying 66671 again.
When the X-15A-2 was transferred to the USAF museum, it still lacked markings, and was displayed in that condition for some time. The USAF eventually painted markings on it and added a couple of external tanks. The markings and tanks depicted Flight 2-43-75, a test flight using empty external tanks.
All that is a long-winded way of saying that the X-15A-2 in the museum has tonal and panel differences not on the vehicle when it flew. (Similarly, X-15-1, 66670, which now hangs in the Smithsonian’s National Air & Space Museum, bears little resemblance, markingswise, to how it looked on its last flight.)
X-15 colors are an iffy thing. Most of the airframe was made of Inconel X, which is a silvery color. However, it turns a bluish-black when heated, including aerodynamic heating. Some panels turned darker than others. Some describe the overall color as gunmetal black. Also, when they stretched the fuselage and side tunnels to build the 'A-2, those sections were painted semi-gloss or flat black. Some panels appeared a metallic gray. Lighting always played a role in how they looked in photos. For example, there are photos and screencaps from Scott Crossfield’s hard landing on Flight 2-3-9 (below) where you’d swear the tailcone was silver, and photos from the same flight where you’d swear it was black. (It was painted black.) The airframes always wound up having a patchy appearance.
Prior to being rolled out, each X-15 was painted a semi-gloss black that had a bluish tint. The paint wore off quickly, though, and so the vehicles took on the color of heated Inconel.
Keeping the markings on the airframes looking nice and new wasn’t the highest of priorities, but technicians did a good job (up to a point) of repainting markings that were scorched after high-speed flight. Aerodynamic heating had a habit of turning the paint to goo. Some paints fared better than others. The yellow they used was hardy, but many post-flight photos show the blue NASA “meatball” on the nose obliterated By the heat. It was generally always repainted, though. The X-15 was NASA’s first X-plane and was the first plane to carry NASA markings, so there was some pride involved.
However, sometimes there were no markings on the wings, or the dorsal rudder carried the yellow NASA band on one side and not the other; same with the serial numbers. The X-15A-2 was an exception to that in that it had the banner and serial numbers on both sides up until the ablative and sealant were applied.
