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Josh Patterson
36 articles

Italeri 1/48 C-130 E/H

April 26, 2014 · in Aviation · · 17 · 3.7K

I can only take credit for the last 75% of this build. Way back in 93 I helped one of my Mom's friends move out of his roofing buisness. He was an avid gardener, which is how my Mom knew him, but he was also a modeler. I always liked going to his shop because he always had something new on a shelf or in process. Once I reached high school age he would also loan me books for reference and doing artwork. (Ones like The Cutting Edge and such, which were mega expensive back in the day!) Anyway as part of my payment for being a mover, he gave me this model, which is one I'd been eyeing for a long time at the hobby shops. He had the basic interior built, but not painted. The fore and aft fuselage sections were joined and the wings and nacelles were assembled and all side windows were installed. (So I got to mask them twice! Once painting the inside, once again for the outside!)

Last year I finally pulled it out of the dusty corner of my basement. I carefully disassembled the major interior bits and went to painting. (He had the cockpit some glossy grey color.) I finished assembly and went to using a crazy amount of paint airbrushing this monster! (As well as time. From the time I started to the time I came up from the basement, almost seven hours had past!) When I do camouflage, I've never painted an entire model one color. I just spray the appropriate areas the color called out for overlapping just a bit. This has changed my mind about that, as I kept finding skips and thin areas in the paint. The next large one I do (probably my B-1) will get an entire coat of paint of a color in the middle of the contrast spectrum! That should help. The major pain was painting the sides of the nacelles nearest the fuselage. Not a lot of room to move the airbrush in there! Other than that it was fun, especially the wavy bottom and the undersides of the leading edges. This was all done freehand while referencing the chart.

The decals were another story. They look as though they had gotten damp at one point as the backing paper was stained. I tried a decal not going on the model and it disintegrated the instant I tried to get it off the backing paper. Two liberal coats got them to where they were workable, but even then I didn't use them all. The stripes for the walkways weren't working, so the were masked off and sprayed. (Had I known this, I would've painted them first and masked with Tamiya tape and sprayed the camo. Would've been easier! I did get a little silvering on one of the tail code decals because it did kinda fall apart on me. As did the yellow door surrounds. It's not as good as I would like it, but I'm happy it's not languishing in the basement anymore. I do need to make an outer door for the boarding steps as the original is gone, as are the inner gear doors. Shouldn't be too much trouble. I just wish I could get hold of the guy who gave it to me so he could see it completed. Now I totally have the itch to start my DC-130 drone controller. Talk about adding color to the shelf! (Didn't they also make the Blue Angels' version of this in ?)

Reader reactions:
5  Awesome

7 additional images. Click to enlarge.


17 responses

  1. Nice build on a "Big Un" Josh.

  2. It is quite the shelf hog!(And I have another one to go!) I also have a 1/48 YB-49 coming. At 43" in span it will also be big! I will be doing a build report/ kit review on it.

  3. Beautifully finished, Josh...nice job!

  4. Great story to this, Josh, and it's good to see the final result, as you say, it would be cool if the original owner could see it now.

  5. I agree, great story, model and photos too.

  6. Josh, beautiful job, and a nice story, hope you can let the guy that gave it to you know how it turned out. I like your photos, looks like it's in a field of grain, not unlikely for a C-130. Also like your take on painting camo schemes, just painting individual areas versus doing a base coat of the mid value color overall first. That must be a big model, maybe bigger than my B-24. Many thanks!

  7. Nice job, Josh. You took on a lot of plastic ! It's so big, it's got to be difficult to even take pictures of ! You probably had to "work out" before you could lift it to paint. Awesome !

    • It was kind of awkward holding it while maneuvering it around to paint. Maybe on my next one I'll put a bat or something in a vice and slide it into the cargo bay and just paint it while it's vertical. Why do I always think of this stuff after I'm done?

  8. Nice clean build, but it would look better in one of your NMF schemes, HA! Great backstory, old models never die, they just collect dust and the box falls apart. There's something satisfying about completing an old kit, you did it up right.

    • Funny you should mention that mike! This one did almost end up in NMF with arctic markings, but there were way to many scratches from the previous builder that I didn't want to remove. My DC-130 will be partially bare as the underside is bare metal. I may get one more to do arctic markings on, because they do look awesome on it! (Or the bare metal prototype before the radome was added. It looks completely different without it!)

      • They did make a Blue Angels version in 1:48 I believe. I have the 1:48 USN kit but my build will be the USCG 1963 version, upper half white, with a NMF on the lower fuselage, DayGlo orange markings on the nose and wings. Oh yeah, the arctic version is a head turner also.

  9. i think fabulous pretty well sums it up

  10. That is one big bird there.
    Nice job done.

  11. Josh,
    Absolutely gorgeous. I like everything about this.

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