obermartin

Added landing lights made from bits of clear sprue. I decided against trying to rig antenna wires. I've never done that before and using this model for my first attempt would be too risky, I think. Maybe I'll revisit that later, but for now I'd say she is done. So now I'll wait until the weather has cleared up (It's been rain and high winds for weeks) and I can take some decent photos for the gallery. Until then, here she is hanging from the ceiling, above a rather silly C47 I built as a christmas decoration last year:

I had thought about doing it this way before, but was afraid of paint seepage at the points where the rectangle overlaps the circle (hence the silhouette cutter on my wishlist, for cutting out masks that already have the correct shape and don't need to be pieced together). Well, I'll have to give it a try.

Not quite yet. But something like a silhouette cutter is on my wishlist. Note to self: Add circle cutter to wishlist. Yes, I am aware of that. Though the subjects I've been thinking about are USN trainer/transport aircraft and antarctic aviation (mainly because my inner 12-year-old finds the squadron name "Puckered Penguins" hilarious), which frequently do feature white bordered insignia.

Applied a few washes and fitted the fiddly bits. Yes, the panel lines are a bit overdone. But since this is gonna go on the ceiling, they should look good from a distance - which they do (for my tastes anyway). Save for some minor paint touchups, maybe trying to scratch some landing lights (the clear parts are just stuck on without glue for the time being) and possibly trying my hand at rigging antenna wires, this is pretty much done. And just in time, too, because look what the mailman brought today:

Awesome, thank you!

Yeah, so far I've been printing my own on white decal paper. But I abhor cutting them out because it usually needs a lot of tries to get the circle contours right. Oh well, seems I'll have to look into custom decal printers who can print white.

I like building colorful aircraft with high conspicuity or arctic markings, which frequently require white outlines around insignia. And doing this by hand is very tedious and usually not entirely satisfactory. So I spent quite some time searching for a generic sheet of white-bordered stars&bars in various sizes, to no avail. Does something like this exist? And if so, where can I find it?

I think the small intake might be the rear part of the intakes you used. If I remember the Italeri kit correctly, you may have to cut the front parts off those intakes in order to get the smaller ones. Edit: Never mind, your kit is a reboxing of the ESCI kit that I'm building. That one definitely has that small intake part (I used it in my build).

I painted the black areas. Which promptly caused another mishap - the Tamiya tape tore the stars&bars off the wings even though everything had been sealed with clear. Never happened to me before. Oh well, I had been mildly annoyed with those anyways, since the markings on the original aircraft had a white border and the decals I used didn't. So I printed my own replacements and included the border. BTW, does anybody make a set of generic stars&bars with white borders? I spent quite a while googling to no avail.

You're too kind Well, decals are on, for the most part. I'm unsure about the upper surface of the starboard wing. Can't find photos of the particular aircraft I chose that show this area, but photos of other aircraft in the same paint scheme show no markings in that area. Next: Another gloss coat, painting the de-icing boots and antiglare panel and then some weathering...

Control surfaces painted and gloss coated for decals. I also tried drawing the panel lines lost in the dayglo areas with a pencil. Might need to be toned down a bit, but I guess it sort of almost works. From a distance anyway, so this bird is probably gonna end up hanging from the ceiling. Anyways, decals next. Those are mostly gonna be cobbled together from the spares box and some I will probably have to print myself.

Finally found a couple days to work on this. My experiment with fitting the wings in stages (center first, then upper outer parts, then lower outer parts) did not really work, so it some filler was needed (next time I'm back to assembling the wing first and then gluing it to the fuselage). BTW - I'm not at all happy with that Revell filler stuff I bought at the local model shop. Very crumbly and sort of feels like spackle. Any recommendations? After some sanding and masking, it's finally time for primer (and I painted props and landing gear while the filler was drying). Some more masking... And finally paint. Unfortunately my trusty MM Fluorescent Red had completely dried up (and is difficult to replace, since nobody stocks MM anymore), so I had to experiment a bit. After some tests, I decided to go with Xtracolor RAL2005 (Fluorescent Orange) over an orange base. So. First orange: And then the fluorescent orange: Unfortunately the Xtracolor paint is very thick and pretty much obliterated the panel lines (I'm brush painting). I thought about stripping everything and repainting it, but decided to press on and paint the grey areas next. It was kinda difficult to find a suitable grey paint - the Monogram Navy guide says, grey parts on transport aircraft of that era should be light gull grey or aircraft/adc grey. But light gull grey is a much warmer tone than the grey in my reference pictures. So I went with Xtracrylix Adc Grey. Which is still too warm for my tastes. Oh well. Let's keep going and mask for painting the control surfaces.

Right. So I started last night. Since I know from experience that pretty much nothing of the interior will be seen (I'm building this one with all doors closed up), I decided not to spend too much time on the interior. This is how I left things last night. And today was spent sanding the fuselage seams, starting to add the wings and painting stuff like landing gear, engines and props: I'll probably add the rest of the wings and the stabilizer later tonight and I hope I'll find some time during the week to get the first coat of primer on this - my modeling time has lately been somewhat limited to weekends.

Hello. As I mentioned in the discussion thread, this group build is what finally made me switch from just reading these fine forums to actually participating. The C-47 is one of my favorite aircraft ever and over the years I built quite a few models of it and since there are so many interesting paint schemes for this aircraft, I'll probably build a lot more in the future. For this group build I was torn between a 1950s Luftwaffe version and an early 60s US Navy R4D, mainly because I'm a huge sucker for day-glo aircraft. After a couple days of looking at reference pictures, I decided to go with the R4D. Though I might do the Luftwaffe one as well. After all, there is quite enough time until the deadline. Anyways. For now, I will be trying to turn this: into something like this: (Photo by Neil Aird) Here's a shot of the box contents:

Hello. is it too late to join in? I've been reading these forums for about a year now but never posted anything. But since the C47 is one of my favorite aircraft and I just happen to have an unstarted ESCI kit in my stash, this looked like the perfect opportunity for a first post. I haven't quite made up my mind about paint yet. It's gonna be either an early 60s USN R4D or a 50s Luftwaffe bird, because I really like day-glo aircraft.