Alex

Here are the masks I designed for the cockpit windows. I have been remiss in remembering to take photos. I painted the whole thing with Mr Finishing Surfacer White 1500, then with White MRP. Then masked and sprayed the light gray areas with Mr Color 338. You will see in the above that I forgot that the tops of the horizontal stabs are also supposed to be gray; I've gone back and fixed that now.

That looks very close. FWIW Humbrol X302 is marketed as KLM Light Blue.

Getting there. The airframe is pretty close to being ready to paint. Al that's left to add are the main gear doors (thankfully closed, so you can't see the absence of an engine inside) and the turbine exhausts, which I felt compelled to re-make since the kit ones were just lumps of plastic.

Modern Zvezda kits are pretty nice, huh? How well do the engine pylons fit the wings? Will you be able to paint those separately as well?

I think that the Z-M approach is a fine one - you can use, or even figure out a way to display, the interior stuff if you want, or omit if you don't. I have started gluing any "at-risk" seams (especially wing leading edges and fuselage halves) completely with CA. It can be a bit tricky compared to using solvent cement, but it is the final guarantee against the seams re-opening.

Very cool. I'm looking forward to watching you build this, and intrigued in general by the proliferation of this kind of entirely 3D printed kit.

Hmmm. I haven't tried the GX-2 gloss black yet - always used just Plain Jane C-02. Got to give that a try for the next NM job...

I decided that I wanted to do something quick and not terribly involved in between finishing the last GB and starting my next complicated quarterscale fast jet project (coming soon to a post near you). Fortunately I have a number of short run kits of obscure commercial air subjects laying around (all in 1:144, since I'm kind of OCD about sticking to a single scale per type of aircraft). The An-24 is a twin-turboprop light transport capable of carrying up to 50 passengers. It was designed in the late 50s and more than 1000 units were ultimately built, seeing both military and civilian service in literally dozens of countries. Almost 100 aircraft are still in use today, including a few with the Ukrainian airline AeroSvit, which keeps them close to home, as Antonov is headquartered in Kyiv. Amodel's kit is a pretty simple and approximate one, but that's fine. The goal (for me) of a project like this is something that goes together quickly, with the goal being getting the shape right and a nice coat of paint/decal job, so it looks good from "shelf distance". Little or no scratch detailing is in the cards. There are a few photos of these aircraft kicking around the interwebs to provide perspective on how to paint them. The kit, as noted, is basic, and I'm making it more basic by painting the inside of the canopy black and ditching the simplistic cockpit parts. There are no canopy or window decals provided, so I will need to make my own canopy masks. I'll use the Crystal Klear trick for all of the cabin windows. To aid this, I thinned the slab-like walls of the fuselage moldings before gluing them together. Most of the major parts will be glued together with CA, since there will be a need to gap-fill everywhere. Here's a look at the "fit" of the wing section to the fuselage. Note that I also accidentally glued the front of the vertical stab a bit off the centerline (the front bit is slightly bent), but I don't care - it's difficult to take back off and at shelf distance under a coat of paint, you won't see that. To try and get those honking gaps filled in one go without covering the whole model with globs of CA, I masked around them before gluing up. I've actually progressed the model quite a bit beyond this point now, but neglected to take any photos before leaving to visit my dad in Albuquerque for a few days. So far I have the wing completely attached and blended in, and the engine nacelles built and smoothed out, ready to glue on. My goal is to finish this one up in the first few days of 2024, so I can park it on the airliner shelf and, duly refreshed, get into the first complicated build of the new year...

Great stuff! I've built both Amodel and Mach2 kits, so I know how much effort it took you to get those really splendid results. Of course if you want obscure subjects, short run kits are going to be your fate...

Thanks!

Thank you, gentlemen. This was a great GB. Lots of excellent models and interesting history.

Thanks! I'm excited to see the VTOL theme there - I've accumulated a few help kits and I'm going to have to build one eventually....

Where are these located? Thanks

And some photos of the finished product. Last steps were painting the leather padding around the cockpit opening, installation of the machine gun, and rigging the upper bracing wires.

On the control wires, I've foregone the ersatz turnbuckle look, as I think that these were usually adjustable at some interior point. So I started by gluing the end of the line that emerges from the cutout in the fuselage. It was important to lay these in as close as possible to the direction they would ultimately point, so they do not take a visible "dogleg" as they leave the opening once tensioned. I let them sit for the CA the cure on its own schedule since putting any zip kicker on now would just mess with the pastel layer. To tension them they can just be passed through the tiny hole in the control horn and pulled tight - friction holds them long enough to get a drop of CA on. Photography is relentless. You can see more fingerprint there (which I will fix) and a bit of the decal border telegraphing, although that is invisible to the eye. The tail codes are about the only decals I used except for the tiny text on the rudder and that little "lift by tail skid only" placard. The kit did not come with the exact tail code of Capt Travers' aircraft, but it was possible to cut up the ones they provided to make the right number. So I opted for that rather than more masks.

Getting the spinner on straight. Left it like that overnight, with the office door closed to avoid tempting fate in the person of the cat. Here is what it looks like in place. Every time I take a photo I see another bit of fingerprint visible in the pastel layer. Note to self - I MUST thoroughly clean all matte-painted surfaces prior to any pastel going on. Thankfully I never did add a top coat of matte paint, so these are fixable with a cotton bud and a bit more pastel.

This is the underside basically finished. I painted the rigging lines with a 1:1:1 mixture of Vallejo acrylics - Steel, Dull Aluminum, and Neutral Gray. It's one of those effects that doesn't really photograph well, but it has definitely blunted the black plastic look, and also dulled down those shiny aluminum tubing "turnbuckles". In addition to rigging the top side, I have to wrestle with getting the spinner on right. I've managed to drill out the hole in the back of it a little too large, so it can tilt a bit when slipped in place. So I have to figure out how to hold it perpendicular to the engine axis while the glue sets. Possibly by carefully standing the model on its tail. Who knows - I'll blow up that bridge when I get to it.

This is the stuff. It seems to be available episodically on either Amazon or Ebay. It is nice in that it is slightly stretchy, has a smooth round cross section (unlike EZ Line), and if you rig it up slightly loose you can gently heat it with a heat gun and it will shrink until it's tight. It's not cheap to buy, but I figure that 25 meter spool is going to last for as many WW1 planes as I'll ever build.

Thanks guys. Paul you are right that it’s far from an “easy” kit, but therein lies some of the satisfaction. If nothing else, it’s satisfying to have learned enough over the last five years or so that I can approach a project like this with some hope of a decent outcome.

Thanks. Really into the endgame now. Keeping my fingers crossed.

This is fiddly and slow. I'm trying to use this method I saw on line, making very short sections of tubing to seize the rigging line in, fixed then by wicking a tiny bit of CA in. I'm not sure it's totally accurate or to scale, but it looks satisfyingly more mechanical than just tying a knot (which I would end up doing messily, anyway) or drilling a hole and gluing the rigging wire into it. Which I used to think was fine for building this type of model. It's clear to me why it takes me longer and longer to complete models as I do more of it. I plan to dry brush the black rigging line with acrylic "Steel" color to hopefully get a more authentic 'wire' look (instead of the current 'black plastic' look). I'm using two different weights of Modelkasten stretch rigging line, 0.14 mm for the control wires and the braces on the tail, and 0.2 mm for the wing braces.

Definitely have a look back at Chuck's CF-104 build. He did a nice job with the NMF.

Prop looks great - I like the wood look. Snoopy would be proud to fly that camel!

That's going to be an interesting painting/weathering challenge! Looking forward to seeing how you tackle it.

Before and after on some pastel weathering. I went especially heavy on the wheels/tires - based on where/when these aircraft operated, I'm willing to bet they never saw a meter of paved runway. I like the way SH did the two-part wheels such that you can see the valve stem (which I painted chrome) inside the little cutout in the wheel cover. Next I will do a final coat of flat (which will tone down the pastel a lot, possibly requiring a bit more on top right at the end of proceedings), and then tackle the rigging. I have to travel for work next week, but I'm really hoping to wrap this one up before the end of the year, so I can say I at least finished four models in 2023....