PeteF

Weird, I had a fast reaponse from Airfix for my replacement wing. Try this email: customercare@hornby.com. The person I dealt with was Lynne Stirrups. Nothing worse than a broken vital part!

The canopy looked odd to me (not realistic) so I used some umber wash in the corners and along the glass parts of the frame. Spent a while redoing the offensive frame to show more plastic. Happier with it now. Also showing the big lip.

Ugh, I'm so disappointed. One of the ludicrous things about this kit is there are three choices for Navigator's side window...depending on where the plane was built dictates the "bulge" on the side. But none of those apply to the planes modeled by the kit. At any rate, the side of the canopy has to be added to an existing lip in the rest of the canopy. Turns out that not only is that lip difficult to cleanly mount the side piece to but it is completely visible. Looks like a huge step and that's the place you have to glue the side on. After painting, the step was visible and looked like crap. I had to go back and do more filling, sanding (always what you want to be doing on a clear canopy) and "thicken" the frame on that side considerably to hide it. After hundreds of hours of trying to make this thing as scale as I can, I have to kludge the canopy frame to hide a toy-like and unnecessary kit conceit. The canopy is just set on the model in the last picture. Blah.

Lots of fiddly stuff finished. I knew the gear doors would be a pain...and they were. This whole "glue the hinges to the part, then hope it all aligns right in an impossible to reach space" thing is for the birds. The bomb bay doors were interesting. In the kit they had a single door per side if it was displayed closed and two doors per side if it was displayed open...again, something like 12 hinges and 4 struts that would all have to align perfectly AND the "two" doors are actually supposed to look like one door when you're done (bangs head on desk). Got the fiddly bits done on the gear including the brake lines and door protector bars. Also wired the back of the doors...going to probably wire the fronts. The gear door mechanism was cables and springs basically pulled by the gear retracting. All that stuff is visible on a real plane. Have a weathering and stencil decal marathon coming up on the bottom but there are nearly no un-built parts left on this plane. Oh and I've been dreading painting the canopy...that's next.

It's probably fortunate that I got the pilot's seatbelts before I got the kit. I was still all enthusiastic and happy when I did those. But once I realized I had to do the Navigator's belts, I put that off for over a month and swore the whole time I was doing them. Only good thing was that I had the experience of the first ones so the second went a bit quicker.

Lots of work done. I looked at Kermit Week's Youtube walkaround of his mosquito and did a tubing harness for the bomb bay. Finally completed the bomb bay and finished the top of the wing weathering. Next I have to do the stencils and weathering on the bottom before tackling the bomb bay and gear doors. The struts for the bomb bay doors are meant to actually slide so they can be positioned right. At every step, I made sure they were free and when I finally painted them, one seized up and broke...sigh. This thing has a lot of broken parts that are glued back together in it I also had to fill the dent in the wing from where my light melted it. I was able to re-use the roundel mask to fix that.

I painted them...should have painted them apart rather than assembled and they are somewhat brittle. Then rubbed them with graphite.

Guns done.

The masks I got from Mal had beautiful instructions and had masking material to put over the stencils to transfer them safely to the model. The Montex ones had no instructions or extra material so I had to use tape. Both were of the same material...relatively low tack but crossed panel lines and went over curves with no bleed whatsoever. So this monster was on my desk by my incandescent lights and one of them was too close to the wing and melted a dent in it! Right at the front of the roundel so thank goodness I’d painted it so I can fix it. Also FINALLY got the .303 gun barrels after weeks of waiting. for them to ship from Poland.

Got the custom masks from Mal for the codes. Also using the Barracuda extended stencil decals...huge difference from the Airfix ones.

Used the Montex masks to paint the B-type roundel on the wings. The kit only had C-type roundel (the ones with white between the red and blue) in it for later planes. Those masks were fabulous to work with. I used a tip I'd read by dabbing clear into the cracks where there were panel lines. Mixed the red to match what the fuselage and tail decals looked like. From my experience with red insignias on my Nanchang, red fades (badly) quickly.

A couple of notes on this kit. The weak part of the landing gear turned out to be the long struts that simply glue to the upper back of the nacelles. One of those fits tightly into a slot, the other just glues to a flat face. Guess which one(s) popped off while mounting the nacelles. So those have to be WAY more secure than just glueing them conventionally. Also with a mix of metal/plastic in the gear, I had a fun time with bits that were CA glued together popping off. One other note, DO NOT PRE-FIT THE AILERONS! They have little tabs that click into the hinges (which is really neat) but those tabs are ONE USE ONLY. I found out the hard way that putting them in once and taking them off leaves you nothing whatever to glue the ailerons to. The instructions are all pictures with no text so you get to find these things out the hard way

Tail weathered.

Using the extended stencil decals...30 decals up to the fuselage roundels!

This feels like my shop.

What a stressful day. I knew this would be hard. Mounting the ailerons/flaps and nacelles was a lot of swearing, breaking small bits and hangar rash. This thing is just too big and the subassemblies are too strong to finesse into place. You have to muscle and bend things together. I need a break!

I can see how a visual effect gets lost at smaller scales so warrants "faking" (airbrushing vs. making) it. Next time, if I were to use this paint I wouldn't use the "air" of the green. The gray was magnificent but the green "air" paint was pre-thinned so much there wasn't anything I could do to help it.

Oh damn, I scratch built the exhaust shrouds and am already past those items but thanks!

Along the way, I picked up the aftermarket photo-etched radiators. At first I didn't think they added much but they do add a nice touch to the front. A lot of the aftermarket parts for this kit are no longer in production so this was one of the few I could get. I wish I could find the intake grille covers (the kit ones are solid) but they are long out of production.

Here's an observation about using the acrylics for the first time. The soft sprayed edge looks weird because it's watery green so actually looks like bright green rather than "overspray." The reason this took so long to paint the green on was that the pencil line had little opacity (so literally took 20 coats) and I had to work it with both damp Q-tips and back-spray with gray once in a while. And at the end of they day, I didn't get the appearance of as tight of a spray pattern as I had waned because I had to fix the transition zone until it looked right. This would have taken half an hour with Model Masters enamel. Dreading painting the canopy, it's going to take a million coats to cover the frame.

Ah, no...I moved it from primarily incandescent to flourescent lights!

This is interesting. A couple of clear coats slightly darkened the colors but changed how my camera phone exposes the green. It looks the same as before to the eye. Made a fix to the pattern on the port nacelle and that's done!

Lots of fiddly pencil lines of green (and 5 hours) later.

One of the points of confusion is photos. In many cases the painters used an extremely thin spray pattern so from 20 feet away, the line looks hard edged. The New New Zealand built Mosquitos are a great example of that, Closeup there’s a soft edge, far away it’s hard to make out. Closeup though, on all my reference photos, there is definitely a spray pattern. I have seen closeup photos of individual Typhons and Spitfires that appeared to have been masked but it’s pretty rare and for sure with this “night fighter” standard mossy scheme, they are not only soft edge but knda messy to boot. Also, it’s clear that each factory where each plane was finished had a different way of painting them so there are more variables. Spitfires will drive you nuts because they changed schemes like 6 times from 1940-41...and then there’s the field or MTU repair variable. I know some factories had heavy “masks” that they laid over the wings to show where to paint. But even that was only usd sometimes in some factories.

Goodness...the Vallejo air dark green is so thin, it took 20 coats to get this green this opaque. To get a fine edge took some extreme thinning and lots of time so this minimal bit of camo took over 3 hours! I've painted entire planes in a fraction of that. I used half the paint I mixed on test spraying and cleaning sprays...crazy. Super smooth finish though but it’s going to take a full day to camo the wing. And no, this scheme most certanly was not masked and painted with hard edges on any operational Mosquitos of this era. I n fact, other than a general gudeline, the standard pattern was applied with significant variances...especially in how far down the sides of the plane it went.