That’s a pretty short list of add ons. Some of the add ons required more work than others but it is still a short list. There were also the usual amount of modifications to various parts, like thinning the antennas, drilling out pipes an other minor changes.

After gluing some of them on and sanding them to a good height, I ran some test piping through to see if this idea would work. I chose two short pipes that disappear into the tanks after passing through a couple of standoffs. I had to drill the holes into the tanks as well. You can see from the above photo that the RCS nozzles were drilled out. The original molding was just a small engraved circle. Here is a before photo: I used only a few of the kit supplied decals. Namely, the yellow NASA tail stripe, the large and small “Star and Bars”, “U.S. AIR FORCE”, and the large “USAF” decals. All the other decals came from the aftermarket Hypersonic decal sheet. This is an excellent decal sheet. I believe that there are markings for any variation of the three X-15 aircraft. Maths multiplication tables are the fundamentals, which we learn since our primary classes. Memorise the Table of 48 given below up to 20 times, in a tabular form. Also, these tables are very useful for exam preparation and revisions. 48 The wings gave me more trouble than I was expecting. They were both warped. I hadn’t noticed this before, but then I wasn’t really looking at them very closely at the time. I soaked them in boiling hot water for a few minutes and then took them out and carefully bent them to remove the warp. I wasn’t able to get all the warps out, but they are now visibly straight and you need to look closely to see the remaining warp.At first this kit made me apprehensive for my own Special Hobby kits that I have in my stash. But after building this one, I feel that those kits will build out just fine. Next came the landing skids. I removed them from the pour plug. They are a two piece assembly. One small piece represents the hinge where the skid is attached to the fuselage. The instructions indicate to glue the hinge to the fuselage first then glue the skid to both the hinge and the fuselage at the same time. Of course by this point I have ditched the instructions long ago. I glued the hinge to the skid and made sure they were square and lined up properly.

After looking it over I decided that I had to add the thrusters on the wings. The ones on the nose had been drilled out earlier in the build. They had markings showing where they were. The wings had no such markings. There were two upward facing thrusters and two downward facing thrusters. I went through my documentation and finally found some dimensions that the would allow me to measure where they should be on the model. I made some marks and then drilled out some shallow nozzle representations. This decal sheet is meant to be used with a set of masks that they also sell. The masks are for the markings that I used from the Special Hobby sheet. Those markings were originally the wrong size. Special Hobby did correct them for later runs of the kit it appears. The kit I was working from had corrected sizes. However, I think the “USAF” markings were still just a bit large. Not a deal breaker, but still not quite right. After verifying that this was going to work, I added a small styrene fence and then poured epoxy all around the threaded insert to permanently affix it to the model. I finally finished the nose gear door. The scoop door required a lot of reshaping to fit the hole. I suppose it would have been less noticeable if I was modeling it with the gear down, but with gear up you have to carve quite a bit off to make it fit.I needed to drill out the vent pipes instead of leaving them as flat ended rods. I also added some straps over the new pipe. Here is a shot of the completed parts. I think I’ll glue them on after I paint the tanks to make masking easier. Next I applied some Tamiya masking tape and used a fresh #11 blade to mask the windows for future painting.

It's much better, but I’m not quite happy with it. I’ll work on it a bit more before throwing in the towel.

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Anyway, after applying some MicroSol to make sure the decals settled in to any details and then giving them time to completely dry, I sprayed on a matte clear to take most of the shine off the airframe. Once that had dried, I removed the masking from the windows, the dot covering then screw hole and the external tank pylon glue points. I mounted it on the stand briefly to get a good overall look at it. You can also see that at this point I’ve added the two underside antennas. I left the masking over the screw hole so that the upcoming clear coats will not gum up the threads. There is also some small rectangles of masking tape that are covering the area around the alignment holes for the external tanks. Those will provide a glue surface between the external tank pylons and the fuselage.

Proper fraction button is used to change a number of the form of 9/5 to the form of 1 4/5. A proper fraction is a fraction where the numerator (top number) is less than the denominator (bottom number). I gave my friend some options on which flight to depict. The external tanks were painted differently and there were some sample ablative patches on the X-15 depending on which flight was going to be modeled. He decided to go with flight 2-45-81 on July 1, 1966. It was Robert Rushworth's final flight in the X-15 and the first with fully fuled external tanks. Now finally I could glue the fuselage halves together. The halves were slightly warped, but that was easily taken care of by gluing the halves together bit by bit from the nose toward the rear. When I was about a third of the way down I shifted to the rear and moved forward. It went together pretty well. I used Tenax 7R and it welded the halves solidly. Anyway, after sanding the proper profile into the inside of the stabilizer, they were glued together at the leading edge only. When that set, I added the wedge to the top of the fin.

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I next moved on to the dorsal vertical stabilizer. The plastic parts are pretty rough on the inside. There are injection plugs that will have to be removed and the leading edge will have to be tapered far more on the inside to allow the proper angle on the wedge shaped stabilizer. The canopy didn’t give me as much trouble as I was afraid of, but it did take a fair bit of sanding, scraping and re-scribing.