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how to get rid of that. Links fixed, switched to Photobucket.
A modeling buddy of mine is originally from Spain. He has a goal of producing a complete set of
all the aircraft used in the Spanish Civil War.
That’s a lot, so he has asked our group if we would pitch in. He has all the kits and offered us our
choices. I picked the Vultee V-1A Bomber:
Now the Vultee was a passenger plane converted for the
war. Part of the conversion was removing
the second row of seats to make room for the dorsal gunner.
So that’s what I did.
Next was the flight deck.
First time using resin parts.
Now the instructions called for putting the flight and cabin
into the fuselage before closing it up.
Put the locator pins were almost non-existent, so I decided to close the
fuselage and then insert the deck up though the bottom opening so I could
position it just right:
Next up was the gunner’s station. Several small finicky bits
to put together.
Then on to the canopy.
Well, the flight deck windows, not really a canopy. Vacuform. First time for that too. The kit came with options to either use the
whole vacuform piece as the roof and windows, or to cut out the windows and use
a plastic roof panel instead. I chose to
go with the whole piece (of which the kit actually came with two – in case you
mess up the first try).
Masked for painting before installing, plus I wanted to get
paint on the inside to help cover that expanse of clear.
And installed:
Next came the wings.
The instructions called for putting the top of the wings onto the single
bottom wing piece before attaching to the fuselage. But dryfitting showed wing root issues, so I
attached the bottom wing to the fuselage first:
and then attached the top wing pieces, to help get a closer
fit. It was still loose, and I didn’t
get a picture of that, but here it is with the putty work:
All masked and ready for painting. Again, for the converted bomber, the second
row of windows in the passenger compartment were removed. Not sure if they were replace with panels or
simply painted over. The reference photos
were a little inconclusive, so I kept the windows in place, just didn’t mask
that row.
Primer coat:
Bottom:
I went with the solid color option for the top color. The tail stripes come as a decal:
But I wanted the red of the tail stripes to match the
fuselage stripe and wing tips. So I
painted the tail stripes instead of using the decal. First try was a bust, I couldn’t get the
color right over the dark green of the top coat. So I stripped and primed and painted again:
Touched up the green where it was stripped, gloss coat and
decals:
Thanks for looking,
Paul