So, a few more photos of the build... :-). After the fuselage was properly varnished, I did a rather tricky bit of work hand-painting the text on both sides of the fuselage. The letter 'K' was relatively straightforward with the exception of adding the slightly ornate endings to the upper and lower extremities of the stem and arms; although decent, the right side 'K' was slightly smaller than the left, so I carefully increased the size and painted out the areas that needed to be tidied up. And talking of small dimensions, the name 'Lotta' could have been made a bit taller, but as it was difficult enough to get the style and position correct, I elected to leave the lettering as you see it. All in all, I'm very happy with this piece of work; in the photos, some of the hand-painting looks 'rough', but this has been improved a little since taking these photos.
I then moved on to applying the transfers. The national markings on the wings were from the kit and were decent, but nonetheless a little problematic with the upper wing crosses as they were slightly out of register. I used them anyway, and corrected the issue by applying thin strips of white transfer onto the offending cross outlines, thus bringing them back to an acceptable presentation; the underside crosses were fine but the fuselage crosses, although good, did not take kindly to me using setting solution and failed to settle flat on the fuselage sides. These, too, were removed. I trimmed the kit crosses with a wider outline back to a plain black cross, and once again, edged them with thin strips of white transfer and this turned out well.
The small numbers '7203' that you can see in the saucer of water are taken from various registration numbers provided for other finishes in the WnW transfer sheet and rearranged correctly to show this particular aircraft's registration; the rudder codes were done the same way but are of a different font and smaller size. I don't know why the two numbers are different on the same aircraft, but this is what the colour profile I'm working from showed, and also the photos on the WnW website for this particular model, under the photo archive tab.
Moving on, I painted the black and white surround to the engine panels but initially the dimensions of the rear white stripe were too narrow, thus making the black section too broad, but I managed to correct this quite easily. The cabane struts were then attached and the mid-wing area incorporating the radiator was added on but this area has a lot going on under the struts - four short lengths of rigging, two engine pipes at different angles and an instrument in front of the pilot - perhaps for the engine? - and there's still the windshield to be added in. The rigging was horrendous as it wouldn't sit at the correct angle, and I reverted to using some stretched sprue which was less argumentitive and better able to be manipulated into position. The machine-gun was also added into the right side of the forward fuselage.
The last four photos in this set show the horizontal tail and the fin in situ; the former is a very tight fit, and the latter is excellent in covering over the small separation of the fuselage halves in that area so no additional working with filler needed to sort that. There was a small gap at the back of the fin where attaches to the rear fuselage but I didn't want to use additional pressure when inserting the piece in order to close the gap in case I added to the likelihood of opening the join line. I filled the gaps on either side with water-based filler and used a moist cotton bud to remove the excess. Once dried out, is was a simple case of painting over the filler. The forward area of the fin was also sitting a little higher than necessary, creating another slight gap. This one was filler with Kristal Klear and required no further painting, as the Kristal Klear dries transparent and on a small area such as this, it takes on the colours of the camouflage scheme around it, much like the sea is blue on a sunny day due the reflection of the blue sky above it. Cable attachment horns were attached to the rudder and elevator without any issue. Finally for now, the lower wings have been added permenantly this evening and are supported under the outer areas of each wing to allow them to set at the correct angle... hopefully.
Anyway, the model looks very striking in this colour scheme and I'm looking forward to working on the next section soon and of course, more photos to follow. I hope you like the progress this far, and thanks again for looking in... ;-).
12 attached images. Click to enlarge.
