The Little World

That was the catch cry of the Wicked Witch Of the West in the Wizard Of Oz when Dorothy threw a bucket of water on her. I’m here to tell you that this was just fiction; I tried it on one of the in-laws and all I got was yelled at. No melting. Next time I do it I’m going to use a bucket of lacquer thinner.

But I didn’t want to do this to the Revell Twin Otter – no melting. I remember trying to take paint off an AMT Model T Ford in the 1960’s and the surface of it sloughed away when I used turpentine. A traumatic modeller’s experience that has made me cautious ever since.

I had a layer of white primer and grey interior paint to go through and suspected that they might have been acrylics, so I tested out a section with methylated spirits. The paint left but the styrene was unaffected. The wiping was getting tedious so I tried the trick of loading the airbrush with meths and turning up the air pressure. Sure enough, it blasted the surface clean in about half the time that manual work would have taken.

It also blasted loose the cabin windows – they had been stuck in with PVA glue – so I caught and saved them all. I made sure that they were entirely free of glue and went round carefully to get any last traces of mould flash.

The places where the wings had been cut off were fairly even, but I trimmed them flat and made sure that when the time came to re-attach them they had some surface to bond to. I knew this was going to be the most critical part of the rebuild as they also shared a wing strut with the wheel fairings further down the fuselage. Fortunately Mr. Warren had not cemented on the landing gear legs.

I had to make a choice at this point whether to use regular wheels or the floats that were also supplied in the kit. It was a coin toss and the sight of an RCAF Twin Otter with snow skis fitted to the wheels was attractive. I have never had a snow plane before so I went internet searching for a civilian one. ( I would have been delighted to make the plane as an RCAF search and rescue but the decals and side flash would have been a massive job. )

Lo, and behold there are Twin Otters galore in Canadian civil aviation. And one displayed in the Hangar Museum in Calgary, Alberta – next to the plane that served as a model for my de Havilland Vampire Mk 1. Fertile ground. The one in the Hangar Museum at Calgary Airport is CF-PAT. It started life as a plane for Pan-Arctic Oil in the 60’s in a yellow and white scheme before ending up as an orange and white ship for Kevin Borek Airlines.

I like the orange but the thought of the name is a little icky. I will see what I can do about it when it comes time to decal the model…I’m sure Kev is a great guy, but…