The Little World

The real 261 is flying the Canadian air show circuit , to judge from the photos found on the internet. I was delighted to see it as it combined the features I love; RCAF prototype,simple colour scheme, decals I could duplicate.

That, BTW is the big one. I use inkjet printing and have a few sheets of Testor’s clear paper on hand ( and more arriving from Dr. Decal and Mr Hyde ). I’ve just perfected the setting for black on clear – now registration markings can be made to go over silver-finish models. This is a major advance over trying to cut and paste remnants from the decal bin.

You may note that the Silver Star is also dramatically-lit. This is the result of a trip to IKEA and three of their gooseneck desk lamps. They sell ’em ten dollars cheaper per lamp than Bunnings and three can act as miniature studio spots. No sense trying to use mushy light on a silver and orange bird!

The two colours of orange are deliberate and taken directly from the airshow photos. The fluorescent is wearing badly on the prototype aircraft – it looks as if it is put on with a whisk broom. I tried the effect and then decided to do it neatly – otherwise I would have been explaining it forever to the anoraks. As it is I’ll have to insist on the old red duster flag in RH and LH versions but that’s directly referable to any RCAF aircraft picture taken in the early 60’s.

Colour is silver-grey especially concocted as a clean, but not polished aluminium surface.

The real aircraft doesn’t have as many of the handler’s stencils as well – I suspect they got sick of repainting them when they restored the aircraft. And the crew are probably a lot more careful than the service personnel that ran them when they were trainers for the RCAF.

This was a mojo build occasioned by blues caused losing the canopy sprue tree for the F-82 Twin Mustang. The replacement is on order at the time of writing, but hopefully will be all done when the post is printed. The Italeri kit has done everything that I could have asked for. It will feature in the Moose Jaw CFB diorama.