Post-Scriptum to "Very nice sandy beach ... but the sea is really far !". French Aeronavale (Navy) Potez 25 TOE. 1934 "Pink Cruise"

[PanzerWomble]

Great progress , your skill with resin is exceptional .

[KevinM]

1 hour ago, PanzerWomble said:

Great progress , your skill with resin is exceptional .

I have to agree Guy and throw in one more tidbit I am starting to realize Hubert might just have a brain.

[CANicoll]

And this is "An update but nothing spectacular to show"??? OMG, I don't get half this much done on a complete build!!  Your work is amazing to follow and is far beyond my simple capabilities.  But fun to watch.

[HubertB]

5 hours ago, KevinM said:

I have to agree Guy and throw in one more tidbit I am starting to realize Hubert might just have a brain.

How easily you can be fooled 😂🤣😂 !

Hubert

[DocRob]

Fantastic progress Hubert. Glad that the production of the reinforced struts went well.
Your experiences with 3D printing will be kind of a guideline for us non enlightened. In surfing we call the first person in current dummy 

Cheers Rob

[Martinnfb]

Hubert, variety of your skillset and the quality of your work is simply fantastic. 

[HubertB]

Thank you guys, you are too kind with me ☺️ (only Kevin seems to have had an honest assessment )

You know you have beautiful eye(let)s, honey ?

Well some more progress today. I had prepared some time ago eyelets for the rigging, using shamelessly the late Les Delatorre's technique for mass production.

So I had a bunch of those :

They are made with 0.3 mm copper wire stolen from an old electric motor. I have a lifetime (and more) of copper wire supply with this one.

Now was time to insert them in all the anchor points for the rigging (and a proof that the holes had been drilled   ):

 

 

 

 

 

When all the holes were duly fitted with some eyelets, I was left with this, of my original 56 ones . And I did not loose one in the process ! (But there is one - the short one - which fell off the fin but i could find easily, thanks to a T-word - this one is for Martin  - bench. Which is why you can count 5 in the tray, when, of course, the number used is even, 52)

 

If you wonder, the hook is the tool used to wind the eyelet, after it is inserted in a pin vise. Des Delatore's website is still up and his tips for WWI rigging are invaluable.

By the way, the long double eyelets will have a fairing built around their base, to reflect the Potez 25's original system.

Once all eyelets were inserted, I fixed them in place with a drop of CA, using my very high-tech glue dispenser :

It is a sewing needle, of which I ground the tip to keep the  eye open, and inserted in a pin vise. When it becomes clogged by CA, a dip in acteone will clean it, and in the last resort, three seconds in the flame of a lighter and the CA is gone.

One last bit of work this afternoon. When printing the new parts, I managed to get very thin walls, for instance for the carburetor intakes. The walls were 0.25 mm thick. Unfortunately, this also means they are fragile, and, of course, one of the carburetor intakes did not like all the handling :

I decided to replace it with a part made in brass sheet: even if it was knocked, it would bend rather than break and that would be easily fixable.

My soldering skills still suck, but I managed to solder a replacement inlet in the proper cone shape :

And in position :

 

 

You may have noticed that the left inlet is bigger than the right one. The Lorraine engine was a W12, and the left and upper cylinder banks were fed by a single carburetor, bigger than the one for the right bank of cylinders. hence the larger inlet. Btw, this is another detail that Lukgraph missed, with two identical inlets supplied.

Et voilà !

Hubert

[Martinnfb]

Lovely work, full of unexpected details. 

[HubertB]

M
Jigs, masks, figures, the trilogy of progress …

Well, time for the Sunday evening update. A few hours of work this week, whilst I was struggling with a back-ache which was making sitting in front of the bench for hours in a row a bit difficult.

First, I am happy to report that my jig to glue in position the cabane struts worked ! To quote Hannibal Smith, « I love it when a plan comes together » 

As I am nearing the time when I will have to splash some paint for good, it was also the time to glue the cabane struts, an essential step before gluing the lower sesquiplane wings, and then the upper wing. Last time I showed the jig I had devised for gluing the said cabane struts at the proper angle. Installing the four cabane struts, the two side jigs, and the upper jig required four hands at some time, with a bit of stress as I had used 5-minute epoxy for the struts, but everything went fine in the end :

 

 

Even though the glue is 5-minute epoxy, I let it harden for 24 hours before removing the side jigs. I will leave the upper jig in place until comes the time to glue the upper wing. The struts are solidly fixed, but I’d rather avoid risking knocking them off in all the coming manipulations.

Then I started applying masks to prepare he painting stages. The fin pennant, and the « BZ 65 » code mask are in place, as are the lower sesquiplane roundels.

No pic of the lower sesquiplane. I have in fact started to spray them, as the underside of the main wing, and I will show them when I have progressed a bit further on this. The rudder is also masked for the tricolor stripes. Whilst we mention the roundels and rudder masks, I have also mixed the colors for the underwing « light blue-grey », the fuselage and upper wings « dark blue gray », and the elusive « French roundel blue ». These colors do not really exist as ready-made references from major paint brands, unfortunately (TBH, there is a good match of the French roundel blue in the Humbrol range, TBH, but I have given up using enamels with an airbrush). I am not really a specialist of French interwar colors, so I lifted the tips for color mixing from the specialists operating on the (dreaded by me, because of the bullying and French language massacre taking place constantly) French modelling forum « Master 194 »

I am also almost finished painting the figures and « fuel bowsers ». Some small touching up needed still, but almost there  

Meet Countess De Laborde :

Her husband Admiral de Laborde in typical French pilots’ gear (the blue background makes his coverall seem a lot more orange than IRL by the way) :

… the two « fuel bowsers », with their protective covers in place, and a harness :

 

The covers are thin packing paper rectangles with stripes painted with various Posca pens, then made to conform to the hump by wetting them with a large brush dipped into diluted white PVA glue. There are two layers of covers, if you look closely, as per original practice.

And finally their « drivers » :

(Muhamad has lost a finger, apparently  )

And a beduin to steer them in the Sahara :

 

TTFN

Hubert

PS : the figures are close-ups in artificial light, and not very sharp. I’ll try better ones tomorrow.

[KevinM]

This is really coming along Nicely Hubert the work is impeccable Sir. Your back is hurting?Your brain should be with all the jigs and manufacturing of parts but keep at it want to see this one finished.

[HubertB]

22 minutes ago, KevinM said:

This is really coming along Nicely Hubert the work is impeccable Sir. Your back is hurting?Your brain should be with all the jigs and manufacturing of parts but keep at it want to see this one finished.

Thank you Kevin. You must be right about the brain ... I had this week one of these "senior moments", and it took me two days of work to realise my blunder 😅.

It was also a proof that I do less French aircrafts than British ones, and got habits ingrained in my aging mind. Let me tell you about it :

British and French rounderls are concetric circles of blue, white and red. So, besides the different hues, especially for the blue, what is the difference between them ? All of you will answer this one easily. On British roundels, the red is in the center, and the blue is the outside circle. On French roundels, the blue is in the center, and the blue is the outside circle. The logic is that the blue is always on the side of the post on the French flag, and on a roundel, the "post" is a virtual one in the center of the roundel.

Well, I carefully masked and painted my roundels, starting with the blue. I then mixed the red for them, and was about to spray it, one day passed in the roundels painting, when it dawned on me that I had painted the outside of the roundels in Azure blue, and was about to paint the center red ! Talk about a Frenglish mash-up !

So, I stripped the wings, and back to square one : painting the roundels on the wings, from the center to the outside, blue, white, red !

Some pics later this week-end.

Hubert

[KevinM]

4 minutes ago, HubertB said:

On British roundels, the red is in the center, and the blue is the outside circle. On French roundels, the blue is in the center,

I can say it can easily happen but when it does the good Lord might hear a string he wish not!

[HubertB]

39 minutes ago, KevinM said:

I can say it can easily happen but when it does the good Lord might hear a string he wish not!

What I can say is that the set of expletives a certain modeller heard on Thursday evening had definitely a French ring to them 🤣

Hubert

[Martinnfb]

That standing camel looks so insanely realistic that I am going to give her a name. Cleopatra  

You may wonder: , "How does he know it's a girl?"

Trust me, I know.... ( creepy Jack Nicolson voice )

Anyway, amazing work as always Hubert. Clean and effective solutions all the way. Figures looks natural with lively impressions. 

Cheers

Martin

[BlrwestSiR]

Stunning work on well, everything there Hubert. 

 

 

[CANicoll]

Super work on the figures - wow.  Quite a bit of work there, Hubert and as Martin said, nice expressions.  Especially like the covers on the camels.

The jigs you made up certainly did the work and I don't know that I've seen such extensive jigs like that in quite a while.

[HubertB]

8 hours ago, Martinnfb said:

That standing camel looks so insanely realistic that I am going to give her a name. Cleopatra  

You may wonder: , "How does he know it's a girl?"

Trust me, I know.... ( creepy Jack Nicolson voice )

Anyway, amazing work as always Hubert. Clean and effective solutions all the way. Figures looks natural with lively impressions. 

Cheers

Martin

Well, Martin, sorry to disappoint you, but Cleopatra should be called Cesar, definitely 🤣.

Spoiler

And you don’t even have the excuse of saying the evidence was hidden by some garments, like the last time in this « special » bar you went to for a drink 🙄 .

Anyway, what happens in Calgary stays in Calgary …🤣 

 

Thank you for the kind comments, guys. As I wear an high-magnification Optivisor, I see small imperfections everywhere …but, oh well, this maybe my first completed GB entry in 15 years 

Hubert

[HubertB]

Masking, spraying, unmasking, and threading monofilament ...

The Sunday evening update.

 

OK, time for the Sunday evening update. I am happy to report some visual progress on the 0Potez. In fact, the bulk of the painting is now done. Some more touch-ups needed, but the essential is behind me now ! (I will still have at the end to fade and blend everything )

So, some pic sto show where I am at tonight :

The fuselage has been painted in Dark Blue Grey, with the nose and cowling panels in aluminium color. I have tried to introduce some modulation, which is perceptible to the naked eye, but unfortunately a bit "washed out" in the pics with a flash.

You can also see I have removed the masks to reveal the "BZ65" code and the base for the fin pennant, as well as for the transparencies.

Following my initial blunder with the roundels, they have been repainted, as the wing top in Dark Blue Grey, and unmasked. Here again, I have introduced some modulation to break the monotony of the dark top color, but the pic is struggling to replicate what the eye sees :

 

 

The underside of the main wing has been painted Light Blue Grey :

 

You can also see it has been pre-rigged before gluing it on top of the cabane struts. The "turnbuckles" are 0.7 mm dia brass tubes, and the 0.2 monofilament is threaded through the tube, into the eyelets, then back into the tube.... Standard rigging technique, but the exercise has elicited in me some renewed respect for people like Mike ( @sandbagger )who do this for each and every of their kits

The underwing of the lower sesquiplane has also been painted Light Blue Grey, the roudels correctly painted and then unmasked.

And the top of the lower sesquiplane has also been painted Dark Blue Grey

And the 70-liters fuel drums have been painted, weathered and aged. Talking of French expletives, you should have heard the ones I proferred yesterday when I inadvertently spilled the (BIG) bottle of Vallejo "Light Rust" on the bench . Well,better that you didn't, in fact

 

And here is the family shot with this week's work (including the tricolor rudder). The top wing is just posed on the cabane struts jig for the pic.

 

 

Next steps tomorrow is to spray some gloss varnish on everything (to prepare for the few decals I have to lay), then matte varnish, and then it will be time to mate the wings and the fuselage

Hubert

[Martinnfb]

Amazing progress Hubert. Color modulation will pop out in the natural daylight. It is well worth the effort.

Cheers

Martin

PS: stop assuming her gender, like totally ...  jeeez

[belugawhaleman]

Nice work Hubert, really coming along nicely! Liked seeing how you did the Camel....looks great.

[CANicoll]

The trials and tribulations you have gone through with this build!  Looking good and the finish line is in sight!

[KevinM]

Hubert I think you might have a winner here in the end game.... lovely plane!

[DocRob]

Going with Kevin here, Hubert. You half made your own kit and paint it to perfection, what´s not to like. I generally enjoy the rigging phase, but always fear smaller accidents to happen, like eyelets coming off after tensioning, ...

Cheers Rob

[HubertB]

Fly Navy ...you'll get free fishhooks !

 

Some small progress today. I sprayed Tamiya X22 where the decals are needed, then proceeded to lay the decals.

Lukgraph's supplied decals are nice and thin, but need to be detoured as the decal sheet is a single piece of printing. They also have a tendenccy to curl and fold onto themselves, unfortunately.

The lower wings "fishhooks" are the decals supplied by Lukgraph, and went on smoothly.

Not so lucky with the upper wing. The right one went on without too much cussing, but the left one fought me for 45 minutes. As laid it's not ideal, but I will touch up the missing and untidy areas. I could have tried tu cut some masks, but the decal solution seemed a good, lazy, one at the time ...

 

I also laid the homemade decals, like the admiral's pennant on the fin. The rudder decal was also laid, but it’s still wrinkled from the liberal amount of Micro Sol I applied. So, some pics later.

 

The wheels got some weathering to reflect the desert use. I used some Tamiya brown and grey line accent, and some blue-grey and light brown chalks. The spare wheel is cleaner, of course.

And "Cesar" received his fuel drums load ...

 

 

Now, please, use parental caution for the next picture, which is a special "gender reveal" for Martin . Although in the shadow, some visual evidence shows that "Cleopatra" is definitely "Cesar" ...

 

TTFN

Hubert

[Martinnfb]