Boeing SST 2707-200

by John Meyer

Boeing SST 2707-200

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This is my Revell Boeing SST from 1968. The kit represents the 2707-200 as the design stood in 1966. The kit was originally released in Boeing's company prototype scheme of mustard yellow, black & white.

The 2707-200 was to be 318 feet long and carry 277 passengers at Mach 2.7. Later on the variable geometry wing was abandoned and the passenger load cut back to 234. The entire project was cancelled in 1971.

I don't mind filling and sanding, but this kit really tested my patience! The only pieces not needing putty are the landing gear struts and the stand. I used 3M Acryl-Blue for the basic filling, and then automotive spot-filler/primer. This comes in spray cans, which I decant into an old Testor's liquid cement bottle. It's fairly hot stuff that bonds nicely to the plastic and polishes out beautifully.

When the filling was done (or when I'd done as much as I could stand), I polished all the surfaces with Micro Mesh.

Painting

I gave the models several coats of SNJ. I started using the polishing powder but didn't think the effect looked right for this project, which I wanted to look more like an executive desk model. So I shot another coat of SNJ and started over, wet-sanding with the 12000 grit Micro Mesh and then buffing it with soft cloth. This gave the SNJ a nice, satin sheen. I suppose I could have used Future on it, but I figured the chances of getting a perfectly smooth, dust-free result were slim. Besides, I didn't want it that glossy.

The upper fuselages were masked off and sprayed with Testor's gloss white from the Boyd's range. I didn't worry too much about getting this perfectly smooth since I knew I could finish it off with the Micro Mesh. I carefully sanded the demarcation to get rid of the ridge where the white was masked so it wouldn't show up under the cheatline decal. Suffice to say there were several rounds of polishing, re-spraying and re-polishing.

Decals

The kit decals had started cracking on the sheet so I had to make my own. I scanned the kit sheet at 600 dpi in order to print them from a color laser printer. I tried printing them straight from Photoshop and from QuarkXpress but the results were poor. I ended up using the scan as a template and redrawing everything from scratch in Adobe Illustrator.

Matching the Pan Am blue was a happy accident: 100% cyan turned out to be a pretty good match on that particular printer. I printed several sheets and barely came out with enough useable decals to finish the models. The printer kept smearing the toner, and I still had trouble with the long stripes breaking or creasing. The black is reasonably opaque, but the cyan is very transparent so it's a good thing I painted the white down to where the bottom edge of the stripe would be.

The stand had gotten pretty scratched up over the years, so it was sanded and then polished with the 12000 Micro Mesh. I tried coating it with Future but couldn't get an even, dust free coat. So I washed it off with ammonia and used car wax instead, which worked great.

This model was more work than I've done on anything else and I'm very happy with the result.

All the same, I don't think I'll be doing the other version of this kit any time soon!

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Model, Images and Article Copyright © 2002 by John Meyer
Page Created 20 December 2002
Last updated 04 June 2007

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