Authentic Airliners DC-9-30 KLM

[Malair]

The WIP is finished, so I decided to post the finished pictures here as well.

 

I've wanted to make a DC-9 for a while now, but never came around to it until now. The DC-9 was the last civil aircraft that was designed exclussively by Douglas. I'm sure many civil aircraft enthousiast knows about the venerable DC-9, so no need to go into details here

KLM had a total of 25 DC-9 aircrafts (both the -15 and the -30) and they served the airline from 1966 to 1989. 

 

I decided to build the DC-9-30 from Authentic Airliners. Many a great build has been made with Airfix and the kit is actually reasonably accurate, but this time I choose ease of building over price. With the airfix kit you have to do a lot more filling and sanding and I wanted to do something easy for now. Some things that I’ve noticed though is that the engines of Airfix are too short and too thick, the fuselage is too short, the vertical stabilizer has the incorrect shape and the wing sweep isn’t a 100% correct. Whether or not that is worth a more expensive resin kit is up to you.

 

Anyway, without further ado:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The DC-9 by Authentic airliners is a joy to build (as are all the other kits by AA). I’m happy with the way the colour of engines turned out. I’ve experimented a bit with the metal colours as I want to get more experience with them. After all, aircraft such as the DC-8 or DC-10 in KLM colours had their bellies entirely metal coloured in more or less the same colour as the DC-9 engines, so I can use all the practice I can get before I even start working on those!

 

Thanks for looking and see you next time!

 

Regards,

Martijn

[MartinSK]

Hi Martijn,

That is great looking DC-9 after longer time in service. Good job!

[Graeme H]

A beautiful build

[Turbofan]

Hi Martijn,

Hands down the best DC-9 I've seen! Just superb, I wish I'd made my Trident as grubby as this, it seems there were lots of dirty airliners around during this era and the KLM DC-9s were no exception.

You were right about the AA windows fitting over the F-DCAL ones, they fit perfectly. Maybe I'll use the decal cheatlines after all, don't know when I'll finish mine though. No rush anymore as you've well and truly beaten me to it!

What do you use for the weathering? Is the exhaust staining on the fuselage sprayed on or brushed?

Nice new display base too, and it looks big, is it for photographing your whole KLM fleet together?

Congratulations, I really love this one!

Cheers,

Ian

[Malair]

Thanks for all the nice words guys, much appreciated!

4 hours ago, Turbofan said:

What do you use for the weathering? Is the exhaust staining on the fuselage sprayed on or brushed?

Nice new display base too, and it looks big, is it for photographing your whole KLM fleet together?

Well, I use two techniques. The weathering on the wings and the tail (both the horizontal and vertical stabilizers) are done with black water paint. I put one drop of washing-up liquid in the water (so it flows nicely) and then simply paint the lines. Let it dry for a bit and then wipe it away in the direction the air would move if the plane is moving. If all goes well, the lines are filed with black (but not too much) and you get some nice dirt streaks as a bonus (if you don’t like the latter, simply wipe them off with more water). As for the exhaust staining on the engines as well as on the fuselage, I use the Tamiya weathering set, which works wonders. You can use different kinds of bristles to get different effects (very tiny brushes work really well for panel lines on engines. I’ve used this technique on the engines of both my Trident and VC10).

 

As for the new display base, it’s indeed rather big. It’s 100 cm x 100 cm. I bought an A4 sized base by 8a Decs, but found it to be too small to make nice pictures. As such, I scanned the base in, modified it in Photoshop (with some additions of my own), had it print on poster format, attached it to a wooden plate and voila: new display base. Indeed, the idea was to make some pictures with additional models from that era, including some KLM ones, but I didn’t have the time to do it properly. I will try to do it next time when the 757 is finished. I’m thinking of making other display bases as well, such as taxi ways or something similar. It will be fun to have some variety.

 

My dream is to once have a 1:144 airport, but I should get a very big garden first for that I suppose (and approval from the misses, who was already frowning at the sight of my new display base....)

[MikeR]

Great stuff!

 

Mike.

[Turbofan]

4 hours ago, Malair said:

(and approval from the misses, who was already frowning at the sight of my new display base....)

I know that feeling!

[stringbag]

Looks superb Martijn and particularly effective on that base.

Thanks for sharing with us.

 

Chris.

[Mountain goat]

Really beautifully done DC-9, I'm sold particularly by the cockpit windows and soot on the rear fuselage. Looks great on the nicely detailed base. 

 

Jay

[Orion]

hello Malair,

"If it isn't  Dutch it isn't much"

So this one is a real winner. Beautiful model, that in real life served the KLM very loyal.

Thanks for sharing this resin model with us.

Regards, Orion / The Netherlands.

[PLC1966]

20 hours ago, Malair said:

 

My dream is to once have a 1:144 airport, but I should get a very big garden first for that I suppose (and approval from the misses, who was already frowning at the sight of my new display base....)

Yeah, good luck with that 

 

Lovely DC-9