Your Heart Would Be A Fireball...

...If you could put this model on your shelf.

If you remember the song from the 1962 Gerry Anderson puppet show “Fireball XL5”, the above title might make sense to you. ;-)

Made from a combination of resin and 3-D printed parts from a new “garage kit” from Fantastic Plastic, the finished model measures almost exactly 1 foot long. Here is the kit the model is built from:

And here are the parts the box contains:

The decal sheet supplied:

Assembly is relatively straightforward, but a fair amount of clean-up was needed on the molded resin parts and some areas needed some puttying and sanding at various stages. The biggest problem with the kit was the fact that one part, the 3/4” long 3-D printed one-piece cockpit section, was badly mangled during a printing malfunction, and Quality Control never picked up on it before it was include in the kit. You can see the mangled section circled here…

The other side, as you can see below, was OK.

I wrote twice to the manufacturer to ask for a replacement but I never received an answer, so I had to make do with this mangled part. The material it’s printed from is a kind of resin that gets very soft when heated, so I first cut the floor area just ahead of the back wall in the damaged area and flexed it back to roughly the right shape after warming it in hot water. Then when cool, I mended the floor by filling it with thick superglue hit with accelerator. Further fixing was done with putty and a needle file. It’s not perfect, but a lot better than it was and the repair isn’t noticeable once the vacformed clear canopy was glued in place. Gaps were also filled with putty once it was glued to the main body of “Fireball Junior” which was also 3-D printed mostly in one piece with a rear plug molded in resin.

“Fireball Junior” was made removable by supergluing a pair of neodymium magnets to the main fuselage and the back of the cockpit module as you can see here, obviously paying attention to polarity…

Once assembly was all done, the model was airbrushed with silver, red and yellow and weathered with chalk dust applied with a small paint brush, and then given a light clear coat of liquid floor polish (Future… or rather its replacement, since Future is no longer made, called “Quick Shine”) to keep the chalk dust from rubbing off. Decals were then applied and the clear vacuformed parts were glued in place using Testors Clear Parts Cement. The following photos show the full result with the model siting on its finished launching sled.

The underside:

Would you like to have a model built for you? Your heart could be a Fireball! If so, please send an email to “jim@smallartworks.ca” with your request and we can talk! (Just don’t ask me to sing! Your ears would never survive.)

Meanwhile, please subscribe to this Substack page so you can be notified of future projects, and feel free to comment below!