The Little World

Never mind your Bell X-1 – your Douglas Skyrocket, X-3, or X-15. I’ve got a real experimental airplane. One on which I intend to try out new things, hell, Hay, or bust.

The canopy of the A-4D was missing from the kit. I needed to make a new canopy shape so that I could weather it and wrap a tarp over it. An unused tube of silver-grey Milliput and some experimental hand moulding has produced a pretty good solid canopy shape there in the open cockpit. The contents of the cockpit were left out and will reappear as a Lockheed T-33 back seat.

I’ll give it a day, lightly sand it, then on to the next stage.

After the seams are filled and smoothed I’ll do a standard undercoat, lay down the light grey-blue underside colour, and mask it off. Then the fun begins.

Modern Israeli jets, like French WW2 planes, sport a three-tone upper camouflage pattern. The colours of both types are attractive but the business of multiple masking to put them down is not. I’ve done a hard-edge three-tone for a Morane Saulnier and it looked bad…and a desert three-tone for a Kfir C-1 and it looked good…but it was still hard edge and it was still a long sequence of multiple masking to do.

I want slightly soft edges – I want easier masking procedures – and I have access to odd materials to play with. One of them is sheets of dental baseplate wax.

This comes in big old sheets about a millimetre in thickness. It’s a stiff wax when cold but quite pliable in normal temperatures. A little heat from a bunsen or a candle – or a hot hairdryer – makes it soft and mouldable, but it still retains the even thickness. In my dental days I used it to form the centre palate portion of a denture – two thicknesses softened and pressed into a plaster model of the jaw. Then the wooden-handled wax knife you see at the left of the picture was used to heat chunks to liquid that were dribbled into the shapes of the tooth roots on the front and sides of the denture. Finally the pink wax was chilled and carved to shape with the other two instruments you see there – the spoon and the Le Cron carver. you could flame it at any stage with a hand torch and the surface would smooth out to a glossy shine.

I intend to heat it, fold it over the top of the airplane, and cut away to the pattern I want to spray once it has cooled. It should have the advantage of staying put without needing tape or White-Tac rolls. With a bit of luck the 1 mm thickness will be enough to diffuse the edge spray to a scale soft edge.

Note that you don’t need to shop at a dental warehouse supplier to get the sheets – you can pick them up from craft shops that supply jewellery hobbies. If you do need to go to one of the dental warehouses , the wax comes in boxes of 25 sheets – made by Investo.