Hope there's room for one more. Looks like the bar is high in this GB.
This is the 1/72 Airfix C-47 that came out a couple of years back. I think 1/72 is a good scale for multi-engined aircraft - this would be a big at 1/48. As you can see, chaos rules at this point.
kit by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr
I'm not quite sure what to make of the kit. The surface detail is good enough for me, although others might want to spend extra for Eduard. (I would always spend extra for Tamiya, but Tamiya doesn't make a C-47, or many of the other neat planes the the "new" Airfix has come out with in the past three or four years.) There are the infamous Airfix injector pin marks all over the interior - which in theory is bad. (More later.) More bothersome to me are the large and overly numerous sprue attachments - I am very glad that I have good Tamiya and God Hand nippers. There were some very fiddly fits which did not impress (I thought them unnecessary) but after a few curses, things have fit together pretty well. (I don't have the fuselage together, although I think it will work.)
I've spent a few hours working on the interior because the plane has one. I intend on leaving the rear hatch open, so there will be a little to be seen, but it's pretty obvious that the cockpit is going to be almost invisible. I don't work well on invisible components. I know good modelers tend to detail because they have high standards - they know what's been built and what hasn't. And photos will get a some of it - although there's precious little even for the camera on this kit. The good news is if there are injector marks inside, or I have to trim or even remove something to get a good fuselage fit, so what - only I'll know. I'm going to be doing some new things when it's time to paint, but for now I'm using my "go to" Golden High Flow water based acrylics which I find terrific. You do, however, have to make your own military colors - which I think is fun. (Golden is an art house brand - the best US art house acrylics methinks - and therefore they have a series of colors designed specifically for mixing. Things like platho blue (green shade) or alizarin crimson - amazing what you can do. What I did need was US interior green. I checked the IPMS article on US interior colors which is based mostly on the data compiled by color guru Dana Bell. I've also got a huge Schiffer Volume on USAAF Markings Colors and Camoflauge 1940-1947 by Robert Archer and son. Turns out that US aircraft were coated with zinc chromate found in a kind of primer for corrosion resistance. When applied alone it has a yellowish hue. And if you look at the innards of a US plane that's what you'll see. However, aircrew found the color poor for glare avoidance. So for aircraft interior, the manufacturers would add some mars black to the zinc chromate. If you add yellow and black, you get something like oliver drab. Which is why most paint companies US "Interior Green" is a kind of light olive green. Just because it was showing up in US planes the USAAF and Navy made color samples - early war was "cockpit green" (ANA 321) - the definitive 1943 revision lists Interior Green (ANA 611.) I find most commercial versions either too aggressive (more like RAF interior green which is brighter) or a bit too olive. (Mission Models has what looks to be a very good ANA 611.) I mixed Golden Chromium Oxide Green, Yellow Oxide, and Carbon black. I am very happy with the result which when put on plastic stock matches very well a very high quality sample in the Archer book.
I left it at that. Had I been trying either to please a judge or making a model where the interior could be seen, I think I would have followed the photo evidence in a somewhat different direction. Now most color photos I have of C-47 or other US interiors certainly show something very like ANA 611. But, depending upon the plane, some of the interior, especially inside the cockpit, is painted early war "bronze green" which was also often used as a reflective surface for the fuselage in front of the canopy. But, as noted, I could have painted it red, or purple, or not painted it at all because there will so little of the interior seen. After painting the interior, I applied matte varnish and then a generous dose of Com;Art Transparent Smoke for a simple wash to emulate the ample grime on the inside of a wartime C-47. Lighting is not perfect, and there's a little color shift, but these pics get the color pretty well.
cockp1 by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr
intfusel by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr
This one is from my wife's iPhone. (My neighbor is a photographer and says iPhone cameras have crushed whole sectors of the camera market and have very good fidelity. It caught the colors of my last build better than my very good Panasonic Luminex.) Not quite enough light but the color shown is a little better:
intcol by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr
I'm going to be sending my plane to New Guinea for the 1942-44 campaign. The conditions there were horrible. The tropical sun brought brutal heat, rain almost every day and night but with heat so beastly that it turned to dust in an hour. Also, C47s were so important that they were in the air pretty much as much as they could be. Three major offensives fought by the Australian Army - one at Buna, one near Lae and a third in the Markham Valley were almost entirely supplied by air. Indeed, the complex and brilliant moves cooked up by MacArthur during the New Guinea offensive would have been almost impossible without constant support from C47s - protected, of course, by General Kenney's formidable 5th Air Force. Crewmen did not measure their tours in terms of missions - rather it was in "hundreds" of hours. So a New Guinea C47 would have been in the air far more often than one in the ETO. (Indeed, paratroopers were a help on D-Day, but their influence was a mixed bag overall after June 6. After the breakout from Normandy, allied generals planned a whole series of potential drops behind German lines, but the advance was so fast that one after another were scrubbed - until things slowed and Market Garden was tried. This kept a lot of C47s on the ground and in training for airborne operations when they should have been used to reinforce supply for the allied army spearheads.) The military bought 10,000 C-47s, but the SW Pacific was, except for the CBI, at the bottom of the supply barrel. That meant that US (and Australian) pilots flew their planes hard. So a C47 would have stayed in service for as long as possible and each one was overhauled many times. Add heavy duty useage to miserable physical conditions and a PTO C47 would have been a well worn machine. In my word that means it will be time for black basing, salt fading, oil fading, lots of fluids (US radials spewed oil) and maybe even some pigments. The photos from New Guinea are not as common as from other theaters (the men felt it was a "forgotten" theater because no sane journalist would go there - that pleased MacArthur because it left him in charge of press relations). I do have some good pics which I'll use later, but these two will give you and idea of where I'm going to try to go.
colfade-pi by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr
fadenad by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr
More later.
Eric