luxskater

Cool, indeed, just around the corner! Nice to meet you

The original: CASA 212 F-HBMP of CAE Aviation was a regular visitor to my home airport Luxembourg-Findel between 2009 and 2014 as CAE had a maintenance base here. Most of the time it was active in France doing typical CAE things like paradropping for the military and other contact work. Meanwhile CAE closed their Luxembourg base and I am not sure if F-HBMP is still active. My photo of the original: The kit: Originally issued by Special Hobby this is the release by Azur Ffrom. I was a bit reluctant to get it as my only previous experience with a Special Hobby kit was their Lodestar and that one required at lot of attention to finish. As the Azur kit offered decals for an aircraft I actually saw I wanted it for my collection. Upon opening the box I was pleasantly surprised! What a huge difference in quality compared to the Lodestar! The kit offers a lot of options to build different versions of the Aviocar, long nose, short nose, different door configs and many more. The build started with a "nose job" to replace the short one with the longer one. I was a bit scared but it worked out quite ok. However I made one big mistake using a different kind of propellor, F-HBMP has the "thinner" version and I used the wrong ones. Well, I left them on as they look okish to me as well. The kit was finished in light grey overall from a DIY shop rattle can that matched RAL9001 quite good. The decals: extensive, complete but very thin. It took a while to get them on and especially the longer parts did split themselves up in smaller bits but I got all on. I am not the best in details as my eyes are not that good anymore so I left out the PE parts for the small bits and pieces. Overal an enjoyable kit and I am quite happy with the overal result! Hope you like them! - Peter

Thanks all for your kind comments Peter

A kit that I almost forgot I had in my stash: the Revell Piper Super Cub in the for me odd scale 1/32 (I normally do 72 and 144). However a must for me as the original is very familiar to me! Tom, the name you can read on the tail, is Tom van der Meulen (and also Tom Jr.). The van der Meulen family used to run a crop dusting and maintenance company in the northern part of the Netherlands, where I grew up. As a teenager I spend many weekends helping out, mostly with gathering passengers for joy flights and making banners for tow flights and later I was part of the team orgnising the "Oostwold Airshow". Super Cup PH-PDL was part of the fleet with a normal landing gear. It was used for crop dusting, banner towing and training flights. As the Netherlands, or Holland if you wish, has a lot of water like lakes, canals, rivers, the North Sea and so on, Tom Jr. thought it was a good plan to have one of his aircraft converted to seaplane. A conversion kit was ordered in the USA and some time later some huge wooden crates and an instruction booklet arrived at Oostwold airfield, the private airstrip in the eastern part of the province of Groningen. His engineers found time in between their regular duties to convert PDL which was not an easy job, the kit came with many more parts than you can imagine! After the work was finished PDL was re-certified as seaplane and the fun could start. Or not? Even though Holland is so rich of water and a new artificial lake was created next to Oostwold Airfield, the aviation authorities were not so keen on floatplane operations. Meanwhile, PDL could be seen proudly standing on her floats at some regional airshows and fly ins. After lengthly bureaucratic fights Tom Jr. gave up and PDL was converted back with a conventional undercarriage. As far as I know it never made any water landing... Tom Jr.'s company is still active in aviation maintenance and preserving some classic aircraft in flying condition like the P-51D Mustang and T-6 Harvard. In 2023, PH-PDL is still active as well. About the kit: pretty straight forward, no big issues and loads of detail. It has the option to be built with doors and engine cowlings open or closed. I opted for closed cowlings as I had some issues getting the engine in place. Besides the decals for PH-PDL it also has an option for a Swiss Super Cup (that actually did land on water). Fun kit to build and bringing back some good and different memories to the Netherlands, the country I left 16 years ago. Peter

Beautiful representation of the 747 in the early days with KLM! Later in KLM service the upper deck got a modification with the sat hump removed and a normal row of windows in stead of the 3 added. Remember seeing them at Amsterdam many many times. - Peter

Haha indeed! Will find a solution when I get there.

So this one was a real struggle and the end result is not really what I hoped for. Managed to loose one of the winglets but found one in an unstarted A320 box. I messed up the markings on the horizontal stabilisers, putting the markings on the bottom side after painting and before mounting. Whilst trying to mount them I broke the locator tabs, both of them! Super glued them on and the right one managed to fall down at least 4 times. Paint was a bit messy, not sure why, maybe too much dust in my appartement... Decals from 26 Decals, lovely as usual but still I was able to screw some things up causing me to get a second set. Anyway, I mostly build aircraft I actually have seen/photographed and this one I saw early July in Funchal, Madeira and I made this photo: And then the finished model: Hope the next one on the bench comes out a bit better - Peter

Very good result keeping my experiences with F-Rsin in mind!

The Revell 787 is a rebox from Zvezda, Revell has their own A350-900, Zvezda produced both the -900 and the -1000 but this is a different moulding.

Stunning! Great work! Peter

That is indeed a clever solution to save space!

Thank you so much for your kind words and happy to have build it in your place. It is indeed very very big but somehow I will find a place for it - Peter

I am also more a 350 fan but during a recent visit to Heathrow I was once again impressed by the size of the 380 and decided finally to start the one in my stash for years. Will look into Micromesh. Here in Luxembourg we do not have a lot of choice as there is only one model hobby shop in the country... - Peter

another one finished! The Revell 1/144 A380 finished in Qantas colors with excellent decals from Hawkeye. A tough one to finish, white, grey and red paint done with rattle cans, due to the large surface not so easy to get it smooth. Used the Revell decals for some details. However the silver window outlines did for some reason not fit the kit so I left them off. Modified the main gear doors and had to shorten the outboard landing gear to have all wheels to touch the ground. I only noticed that the left wing was slightly wrapped after completing the kit... Still have to add the decals for the landing lights. Now I have to find a place to put it, it is huge!! - Peter

Nice ones! Floatplanes are a class for them, love it! - Peter