Search the Community
Showing results for tags 'Roden DC-6'.
-
I finally present SE-BDB “Agne Viking” my Roden DC-6 which began life as part of the Airliner III Group Build last year. Very near the end of the GB I messed up the finishing and had to strip the model back to the bare plastic and start again. As I admitted at the time I was fed up with it, other things got in the way and the DC-6 languished for about six months before I got round to re-finishing it. I used the “Independence” issue of the kit because it includes the round-tipped Curtiss Electric props fitted to early SAS DC-6s. The build is more or less out of the box apart from the radar fairing on the lower left front fuselage and the astrodome for the over-water version. The fairing was guesstimated from photos and sculpted from Milliput and the astrodome was based on a part salvaged from a deceased Minicraft DC-4. Both took a bit of fiddling to get right although we’re talking awkward rather than difficult. Generally the kit went together well although some bits - notably the engines and the undercarriage - are a trifle crude. Roden have been generous with scribed panel lines but the quality of the scribing on the fuselage leaves a bit to be desired, particularly for a natural metal finish. After several abortive attempts at improvement I ended up filling quite a lot of the scribing and leaving an effect similar to the Minicraft DC-4. I know that was a cop-out but if I’d done anything else I doubt if the model would ever have been completed. The finish is AK Interactive Xtreme Metal Aluminium with Rub n Buff to provide a little contrast. Rub n Buff is a medium which has rather gone out of fashion but I’m fond of it, not least because it is very easy to use. The only problem is that decals don’t stick to it very well unless it’s over-coated with Kleer or something similar. Exhaust and weathering was done with pastels and a Tamiya weathering set. The F-DCAL livery decals looked beautiful on the sheet but applying them was a bit of a nightmare. Luckily I started with the windscreen which disintegrated as soon as I tried to position it. That forewarned me and I coated the rest of the sheet with Microscale Liquid Decal film which helped but at the expense of the decal film becoming more prominent against the natural metal. I quickly came to hate the way F-DCAL had printed the windows, doors, stripes, titles and everything else as a single decal, one for each side. That approach might work for laser decals but with fragile silk-screened ones it just made everything twice as difficult as it needed to be. By cutting the main decals into more manageable sections I got there in the end but I still had several heart-in-mouth moments and at one point I thought I was going to have to buy a second sheet. Fortunately that turned out to be unnecessary but I won’t be posting any close-up photos! After I had committed myself to the SAS scheme I realised that all the registrations were missing from the decals. Unfortunately F-DCAL’s customer service had a major hiccup and failed to sort this despite repeated e-mails. Viking very kindly helped me out with some spare Lima November registrations. Many thanks John. My apologies for the lack of spinning props. The fit wasn’t great and they had to be fixed in position. I have been told that the Swedish-registered DC-6s had their blade tips painted blue-yellow-blue rather than the white-blue specified by F-DCAL. If anybody has photos to confirm this on the natural metal scheme I’d be interested to see them with a view to updating the model. Final thoughts? It’s nice to get to the end of what turned into a lengthy and occasionally fraught build. With its blunt nose, short fuselage and round-tipped props “Agne Viking” looks quite different from the ubiquitous DC-6B and from some angles can almost be mistaken for a DC-4. Overall I’m pretty pleased with the result and I hope you like it too. It would be nice if one of the decal makers gave us “photo-real” windows for some of the classic propliners. Thanks for looking and as always constructive criticism is welcome. Dave G