The Little World

The Tuesday Soviet saw my new Airfix model box for the first time today and most seem to approve. I opened it up and started to study the instructions – fully intending to do most of the building on my Tuesdays to prolong the pleasure.

The Airfix instructions are good – I experience little or no problem deciphering the picture they draw of whatever parts are being combined, and I really do think the use of a red colour overlay on the subsequent diagram is excellent – it lets you see the continuity of the work and check whether you have actually understood the first bit. You get time before the cement cures to rip things apart and reverse them. But don’t ask me how I know that…

The diagrams use a code to let you know whether a part is to be painted – there are numbers. True to their own marketing ambitions, the paint numbers are Humbrol. This is fine – Humbrol are wonderful enamels. But some of us are using Tamiya, Creos, or Vallejo acrylic sets. We are left puzzling about some of the Humbrol code numbers and must resort to a look-up table to translate. I suspect those translations, myself, as some of the call-outs seem debatable. Brown cockpit?

The whole subject is debatable – the aircraft was either a lend-lease or purchase between Britain and the United States and I cannot say from any of the resources I have how much of the internal painting was done to British or American standards. I have had to make a bet and then back it:

a. I think this plane would have rolled out of the Boeing plants wherever with zinc chromate inside the less-visible portions of the wings and fuselage. That’s the shit muckledy dun yellow green flat paint. I’m guessing wheelwells, wing interiors, fuselage interior in no-pilot comparments, bomb bay, etc

.

b. Equally the Air Ministry could have issued one of their pompous little orders about the pilots and bombardier’s compartments to be done in the FS equivalent of British Cockpit Green. Whether Boeing and Dupont would have taken any notice of the AM  – particularly if they were being paid by Uncle Sam instead of John ( Bankrupt ) Bull – is another question. The AM may have had to take what was given to them and like it. I’m playng nice to the AM. I’ll do the cockpit area in Cockpit Green but aft of that it’ll be zinc chromate and the occasional bit of bare aluminium trimming.

To aid in the Tuesday work I’ve brought the kit home and sprayed the interior parts today – the two greens. I’ll spend a happy morning next week brush painting the trim and details to liven up the inside. It’s not war work and I can take as long as I like.

Note – the fit of this kit is superb – even in the dry stage. I can see no stress in geting smooth seams with very little puttying. I am delighted that Airfix – an old favourite of mine – are on the climb again.