The Little World

Relax, folks..all is going well. But I cannot help but think that it could have gone well more easily.

I am not a patient man with puzzles. I can stand about 15 minutes of a jigsaw before I go out looking for strong drink. I do not read mysteries. I should have set fire to the Gordian Knot long before Alexander came on the scene. And I sometimes run headlong toward some job before thinking out the best sequence of action.

I’m getting better. An episode of Flory’s Bite-Size Modelling introduced me to the idea of sitting down with a kit’s instructions and mapping out the sequence of assembly long before cutting the first sprue tree. That’s good, and it’s saved me some major bloopers – I put in landing gear when the maker says so, rather than struggle with it at the very end. I do sometimes change the order of assembly, but I can now think through why I might need to do it.

However, when it comes to the more complex paint jobs, I’m still sometimes out of sequence. This Fokker scheme may be one of them – or maybe not.

It’s meant to be a standard commercial paint job- patterned after what Fokker supplied to the market as a basis and then modified afterwards. It looks as if Fokker and a number of other makers would offer a basic white fuselage top with bare metal underside and then paint the wings and horizontal stabiliser in a light or medium grey. The airlines would then add their own stripes, colour blocks, and logos and the country where they were to fly would specify the registration letter or number display. In my case that makes a five-colour palette with a tiny bit of yellow at the prop tips. Not hard to do with Mr. Color lacquers, but you have to mask between shots. And it seems I have been doing nothing but masking and peeling  for two days.

In particular I seem to have covered and uncovered the tail several times. Successfully, mind, but I suspect I could have done it with less dressing and undressing with masking tape had I planned it better.

Anyway, the wings came out perfect and I was not misled into trying to mask and spray the anti-icing boots. Whenever I do I get bleed, creep, and overspray and in the end spend far more time repairing the scheme than if I just bite the bullet and hand-paint the boots. I relaxed my lacquer rule insofar as I used Mr Hobby aqueous acrylic Tyre Black for them*. All good.

I am tempted by the result so far to look for another airliner model and try to build it as the old airline travel office models were presented – with smooth gloss contours, solid silver windows, clear acrylic disc propellors, and gear up on an artistic stand. It wouldn’t fit into the Wet Dog Regional set but it might look good as a display in the living room. And it needn’t be 1:72, for that matter. I wonder if I can find a Vickers Viscount?

*  Sensible choice as it turns out. The aqueous thinner doesn’t reactivate the lacquer paint under it and the top colour goes on cleanly. Noted for the future.