From F-27Pax's workbench

[F27pax]

April 2019

Let's start with the last of the Fokker F-27s and Fokker 50s that I'm planning to make. This is the Eastern Express 1/144 kit that comes with Virgin Australia decals. There's nothing very remarkable about this kit which goes together with a minimum of fuss.





Moving in to 1/72 here are a couple of resin kits. This Castel C.25 originally appeared in Jean Pierre Dujin's little plastic bags but has, more recently, been re-released by FSC Dujin in a cardboard box with the original Dujin resin parts but also a small etch set that provides some seat belts and a rather splendid decal sheet. Only the most foolhardy of modellers would attempt this colour scheme, and I'm not one of them. Even applying these large decals was something of a test of nerves.





I'd never heard of Croco Models until their kit of the Aero Commander 520 (there is also a kit of the 560) appeared in the Aviation Megastore catalogue. An early Aero Commander has been on my 'want' list for decades, and finally here it is. The resin casting is very good but the crash moulded transparencies are very poor by comparison, so the trouble I went to to make the cabin look interesting is lost. There are the usual fit problems, and trying to sand flat the wing and tail junctions with the fuselage - without damaging the control surface corrugations - was a challenge. As well as these civil markings, the kits comes with US Army and US Air Force decals. I'd recommend this kit to anyone who already has some experience with resin kits.





On the military side; I've been looking for something to replace my very old Modelmaster Armee de l'Air camouflage paints. I haven't been happy with the acrylics I've seen so I was delighted to see that Hakata had released a set of French colours in lacquers. I am not happy with the green in the set and have chosen a green from the new AK Real Color lacquers instead, but I am delighted by the quality of the Hataka lacquers and will be using them a lot in the future.
As a test for these new paints I decided to have a go at making the Bloch 150 series fighters, starting with the RS Models Bloch 151. It has a nice little cockpit, but you can't see very much of it since it is finished in the French dark blue grey scheme. The Hataka paint flows very nicely through the airbrush and required only two coats for good coverage. I hand painted the other top side camouflage, which would have been a disaster with the old Modelmaster paint. I'm declaring myself well pleased with this new paint and you can expect to see a couple of Bloch 152s, a 153 and a 155 in the forseeable future as a result.





Delving back into the mists of time here are two that I made previously

The F-Rsin Bristol Brabazon is the first kit that I paid over $100 for. That seemed outrageous at the time but is becoming more common these days. It is a difficult kit in that the moulding is the wing trailing edges was very uneven and I had to replace them with plasticard. Painting this kit was the first time that I used Tamiya TS-83 and I didn't read the instructions about using a black base. As a result, the finish is a bit uneven, but the thing does glow fantastically. I have plans to repaint this model one of these days, but I'm not feeling brave enough at the moment.





I don't quite remember when I made this but it is finished in ye olde Testors Metalizer, which nobody uses any these. I know that it is a difficult paint to use in many ways but on this WB-47 (an ancient Hasegawa kit) it looks fairly realistic for an aeroplane that has seen a lot of flying.

[Twokidsnosleep]

Some really interesting and unique aircraft all very well made
Good stuff

[Kevthemodeller]

A B-47 love that plane

[F27pax]

May 2019

Continuing on my dual themes of Bloch fighters and acrylic lacquers paints, here is the RS Models Bloch 152 painted with Hataka and AK Real Color lacquers. I was as pleased with the finish on this one as I was with the finish on the Bloch 151 last month. Although I had a few decal sets with decals for Bloch I52s the best ones came from the kit which offers four options. I have a second RS Models boxing of the Bloch 152, this one with Vichy and Luftwaffe markings, so I might be make using one of the aftermarket decal sets on it. The Vichy red and yellow striping being a serious pain to achieve successfully and completing a French aeroplane in German marking being too distasteful to contemplate.





This Eduard 1/72 Grumman F6F-5 was another experiment. Eduard kits come highly recommended and as Hannants were offering this one on special I decided to give it a go. It wasn’t too difficult to make and has pretty good details too so I was somewhat impresses. The other experiment was in trying out the AK Real Colour lacquers on it, and again I was very pleased with the result, although I am not convinced that they’ve got the shade of deep blue quite right. The kit comes with markings for two US Navy aeroplanes but I already had a few sets of after market decals for Aeronavale F6Fs so I decided to try one of them instead. I was a little disturbed that the French naval roundels didn’t have the usual anchors superimposed on them but, on checking reference photos, I found that not all Aeronavale F6Fs did. I don’t think the F6F is one of the best looking aeroplanes Grumman ever made, but it sure looks better dressed up in French markings, to my mind anyhow.





Continuing on another theme, here is another Fokker airliner, this time a Revell 1/144 Fokker 100 straight out of the box. It is a nice little kit and not difficult to put together. As usual, the white finished is achieved through application of about seven coats; two coats of Tamiya white primer, three coats of Spartan automotive lacquer and then two coats of Taimya rattle can Pure White. The decals were published by Southern Skies, a small outfit in Western Australia which has produced some other interesting decal sets which are, I think, now increasingly hard to find. This one goes with a Skywest Fokker 50 that I made earlier and a similarly liveried Airbus A.320 that I will get around to making in the coming year or two.





Another theme I’ve been working away on for the past couple of years is a set of Douglas airliners, beginning with a Douglas DC-1 (converted from a CMK DC-2) through the entire line of Douglas airliners, ending with the DC-10. Earlier I made a DC-8-50 series in Air New Zealand livery as that was the type that Valma and I flew to Auckland in in 1974, on our way to the United States for DUFF. We continued that trip from Auckland to Los Angeles in a DC-10 and so it seemed appropriate to make this model also in Air New Zealand Livery. I started this project using the old Airfix 1/144 kit but it was so badly warped and deformed that I had to abandon that and used, instead, the Accurate Airliners full resin kit, which is expensive but also almost worth the additional expense. I’m not sure who made the decals, I bought them from Airliner Hobby Supplies but the decal sheet and instructions don’t say where they came from. These decals are made to fit the Airfix kit and don’t fit precisely on the Accurate Airliners model, which caused some tears before I solved the problem.





Here are two that I made earlier.

First is the ancient Revell 1/144 Douglas DC-8-62F in the markings of Flying Tiger, an exclusively freight airline. I think I made this model in the 1990s when the best metallic modelling paint was Testors Metalizer. I’m quite pleased as the result on this model which gives a reasonable rendition of what a slightly weathered and hard worked freighter might look like.





Finally, the Dujin 1/72 Liore et Olivier H.43, a floatplane that you might have seen in the skies over coastal France in 1939 and 1940. This is one of the very limited run and now exceedingly rare resin kits made by Jean Pierre Dujin before his untimely death. This was also a very challenging kit to put together but I’d like to think it does the kits maker’s craft justice. Very few Dujin kits came with decals so these were scrounged from all over the place and I think I might have found the coat of arms on the interweb, copied it, reduced it in size and printed it on decal paper to get it onto this model. I completed this model in late 2009 and I see that the blue in the French roundels had faded quite a bit since then. Domage.



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[jmurphy18]

Quite lovely builds! Nicely done

[F27pax]

June 2019

We begin this month with a couple of Airbus A300s, the same airliner but in two different liveries. The first is of the first A300 delivered to TAA in 1981 in a new livery designed for the introduction of the A300s to Australian service. Unfortunately for TAA there was a severe downturn in passenger demand around the time of its delivery, rather than the growth that the airline had expected, so the A300s proved to be a near fatal disaster for TAA. To save the situation some of the airline’s A300s had their delivery delayed and others were leased. One of them was VH-TAA which leased to Condor in Germany for a few months and then to Air Niugini for the rest of the 1980s.

The kit used for these models is the venerable Airfix 1/144 kit, which was first published in 1974. It has not been re-released since the early 2000s but copies are still often available from sites such as ebay. Overall is it a good solid kit but nothing special. It has, for example, fine raised detain on the wings and no detail worth speaking of on the fuselage. This would give those who like scribing and re-scribing panel lines a serious workout of their skills. Fortunately for me, I had the Liveries Unlimited corogard wing panels decals instead, which took away the need for any such effort.

First, this Airbus A300 as it appeared when it arrived in Australia in 1981 and flew as until 1984. The decals are from Hawkeye and contain a serious error in that the windows do not slant upwards at the rear of the passenger cabin as they should. The work involved in modifying the decals to represent this major feature in the A300 would have been extremely difficult so I did not attempt it. Instead, please pretend that I said nothing





The decals for VH-TAA when it flew for Air Niugini between 1984 and 1989 with the registration of P2-ANG, also come from Hawkeye. The decals for the ‘Bird of Prey’ scheme come in one complete section for each side and I could only imagine that you were supposed to apply them before attaching the model’s wings first. I took a different approach and cut the decals into three parts as carefully as I could; the upper section, the lower section and the head. Attaching the upper decals first allowed me to line them up fairly well and gave me a guide as to where to place the underside decals and the heads. Applying the decals required a fair bit of patience but turned out better than I expected.





Next is another Revell 1/144 Fokker 100. This model was made more or less straight out of the box with the addition of Ric Warcup decals to portray an Air Niugini one, P2-ANQ which may be, for all that I know, still flying.





And here are three that I made earlier.

The Douglas P-70 was a night fighter version of the well used Douglas A-20, or Boston as it was called when it served with the RAF. The kit is as ancient as my Airbus kits, being released by Revell in 1975, and a variation on their A-20C Havoc kit released in 1967. For all that I found it a much more modern feeling kit than the Airfix Airbus kits with a much better feeling for detail. The matt black finish makes this kit an easy one to paint, but I did increase the level of difficulty by making new radar aerials from stretched sprue to replace the parts in the kit.





If my memory serves me right the Hindustan Aeronautics HF-24 Marut was the final design of the legendary German designer, Kurt Tank. I think it is a particularly attractive aircraft so when I stumbled across this Model Alliance 1/72 resin kit I snapped it up. It turned out to be a challenging little kit to make and there is a lot of filler hidden beneath this model’s nice polished metal finish. Because of this difficulty I might not have finished this model, had it not promised to look so delightful when it was completed.





Finally for this month, the 1/72 Heller Dassault Mirage IV. I have never seen one of these aeroplanes live but I imagine it would be a striking sight with size combined with Dassault delta elegance, This kit was released in 1979 when Heller were producing some of the best kits of those times, and still some of the best quality kits ever, in my opinion. This Mirage IV kit is an excellent example of the company’s craft and has been released several times more recently. I’ve got another one stored up so I can make it in bare metal livery. It will be beautiful.

[Norman]

Nice work mate !