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Showing results for tags 'Silver City Airways'.
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Hello all, this is another in the series of old model kits that have crossed my workbench recently. I had one of these in 1966 or '67 and built it as an 8 - 9 year-old would (which I was at the time!), in the amazing Silver City Airways scheme. I even painted it with Airfix paints from their funny shaped bottles. A few years ago I got another one from our friends at KingKit and, as usual, it went straight into the stash. A few months ago, I was looking through 26Decals' website and found that they did a set for the Silver City aircraft, so ordered it in despite the fact that they were laser-printed. I knew enough by then to know that some accurate masking would be needed, and after doing a Twin Otter that also needed accuracy in the masking stakes, I felt I had enough experience. I put out a request for help on this fine Forum in the Classic Civil Aircraft - up to 1968 section for colours for this aircraft, and was rewarded with an amazing amount of help, so a big THANK YOU to all those who chipped in for me there. I did very little to the kit itself, I just added some seatbelts, replaced the 'working' clamshell door hinges, sanded off most of the rivets (what surface detail that was left looked like 'oil-canning' so that was good). I re-scribed some panel lines (and got one at least skew-whiff!), and added card to the ends of the control surfaces to get them to fit a bit better. I photocopied the transfer sheet and used that for the demarcation between the white and silver, with the intention of putting the transfers down over the white area. All went well, except for the nose door curved transfers - I got them horribly wrong and had to do a little 'artistic licence' (or a a vague sort of 'what-if'). That is why the doors do not have a thin white cheatline whereas the main markings do. The explanation for this is simple - Silver City Airways changed their schemes a few times, and one of the schemes seems to show no white cheatline, just pure blue. So, in this case, this aircraft had a problem with its clamshell doors, and they were replaced with a pair from another Superfreighter that was u/s, but it had the other scheme on, hence the mis-match. Well, I suppose it is possible. Anyway, here is what I ended up with: Most of the paintwork was from rattle cans - Tamiya Light Grey Primer and White Primer, and Halfords Audi Aluminium Silver. The blue retouching for the nose and other small areas where the transfers needed adjusting was two coats of Revell matt Blue followed by two coats of Revell Gloss Blue acrylics, brush-painted. The wing and tailplane joints were pretty good, but in an ideal world I would have fitted them before painting (they were all done separately for ease of masking), so don't look too closely. The transfers behaved very well, but were translucent, and I was very please that my masking, with the exception of the nose transfers , was pretty much as good as I could have got. All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed my trip down memory lane, another is in the pipeline now as I am about to start the Airfix HM Bark Endeavour, which I had at the same time as my original 'freighter, but I had to get my Dad to build that one for me. That is that, thanks for looking and getting through the waffle. All the best, Ray