As I said in the previous Ar-65 installment, there are no pictures for the remainder of the building process since it was so on and off for a length of time. But let me tell you that it was a most enjoyable one. Almost no putty was used, save for the nose, which I'm not really convinced on how it ended up looking, and a small seam at the belly of the fuselage. Also, RS plastic is, so far, one of the nicest I found to work with. Glues well and sands even better.
Moving on to the painting scheme, both the Luftwaffe and VV machines are in RLM 02 Grau. But the badges, cheatline and markings of the bulgarian bird make the german option almost superfluous. Besides, why build a boring war time machine when you can build a colourful pre war one? So I cracked open ModelMaster's RLM 02 and sprayed the whole of the aircraft with it. One good thing about MM paints is that with a very little additional dilution and sprayed, they render a nice satin and uniform finish. Once it was dry, the cheatline was masked off with Tamiya Tape and hand painted using Humbrol 19.
Also, you can see the wheels and propeller already having their red parts painted. I gave the wheels and cheatline two coats of Red for the sake of colour density and left to dry thoroughly beetween coats.
Off came the Masking Tape and that's some nice cheatline and red nose:
The tail banner was painted at this instance. And this is the end result for the painting process:
Once this was done, it was time to put some decals on it. A czech kit, an obscure subject, and 1/72nd scale... Decals had to be Propagteam, of course! Over the course of the years I've had a love - hate relationship with Propagteam's decal line. They're thin, with a nice decal range and density and are a hell of a nightmare to apply. They either curl, fold or tear at the least effort done to position them. And do not react well to setting solutions too. Also, they tend to leave a silver carrier surround if the kit was not coated with gloss varnish or the carrier film is not trimmed to the minimum surrounding the markings.
With that said, I started applying the markings from the tail forward, so I could have always some free surface to grab the kit without taking a decal off with the fingers. I tried something new here. I'didn't clear coat the kit with varnish, and relied only on the satin finish of the paint.
Seems to be going well...
Ok, almost there...
No silvering so far and that's good...
Now the lower wings...
And for the grand finale, the upper wings:
Decals were left to dry... some months ago... And I still have to give it the final clear coat. A friend of mine suggested that leaving Propagteam decals for so long without any protection is not wise, since they're so thin and they might end up peeling off. So I'll set to spray the kit as soon as I have some spare time.
As you can see, the overall quality of the kit is noteworthy, specially having began as a resin kit transitioned to plastic by the fellows at RS. The resin radiator is quite nice. My kit came without the tailskid but that may be down to the guy that sold it to me. I still have to scratchbuild it, but it's a fairly simple three legged affair.
In our next installment, the final bits will be added, a base built for it and the issue I mentioned in the first part of this article, finally disclosed.
Till that moment comes, enjoy life, build model kits, take care and good luck.
The Modeling Underdog
Comments