I’ve finally gotten round to the smoke pods. I initially intended to use 2 mm plastic rod, but when I zoomed in on a photo of the real plane on my iPad so that the length of the wingtip launch rail matched that on the model, I found it needed to be about 2.5 mm. A lot of searching though sprues (nearly all 3 mm, some larger, some smaller, but none 2.5) and spares parts boxes later, I discovered that the exact size needed were … the AIM-120 AMRAAM missiles that came with this F-16 kit in the first place
All I needed to do was remove all of the fins, cut the missiles down to about 45 mm long, fill all the grooves moulded into them, then add new fins. I also drilled a hole into the rear of each, as I intend to use them to support the model on twin steel rods. This entailed outting them into a lathe and drilling them out to 1.3 mm, but unfortunately, that went slightly wrong on the first one:
Too high RPM and drilling too quickly meant the plastic melted a little; the second attempt (slower for both) went better. If I’d had another AMRAAM I would have just made a third one, but no such luck, so I had to deal with the damaged one. What I did was shave off the melted plastic, which left holes in the sides, so I glued in the 1.2 mm steel rod and then just filled the holes and grooves with putty. Two days later (that is, about an hour ago) I sanded the putty smooth. In retrospect, I should have inserted the rod without glue, filled and sanded the holes, and then removed the rod again as this would have made it easier to handle the model for painting.
All that remained was to make the fins from 0.25 mm plastic card. They’re just eight bits, 3 mm high, 7 mm along the bottom edge and 5 mm along the top edge, with the rear corners at 90 degrees.
And glued them the model:
Once painting is finished, there will be one rod in each of the smoke pods to hold the model in an in-flight pose.