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My scale model airliner build portfolio basically serves as a Cathay Pacific advertisement at this point, and this one is no exception lol. Subject - Cathay Pacific Boeing B777-300ER (B-KQY) The Boeing B777 was designed as a widebody long-haul aircraft designed as a replacement to aging B747s. Having been the first airliner fully designed with CAD, as well as Boeing’s first airliner to fully use fly-by-wire controls, it represented a quantum leap in airliner efficiency. Cathay Pacific Airways is the flag carrier of Hong Kong, offering passenger and cargo flights to international destinations around the world. It is considered one of the world’s largest and most prestigious airlines. The airline was heavily involved in the development of the B777, even becoming the recipient of the first prototype and the launch customer of the -300 variant. Cathay Pacific continues to use the type heavily in medium and long-haul routes, and is one of its largest operators. The aircraft depicted is B-KQY, one of CX's newer 777s that I was on twice, one from an FCO-HKG flight and on another in an HKG-MNL flight. The fact that I've built this same aircraft multiple times before made it easier to make the decals and copy the window layouts. B-KQY now seems to reside in storage along with other CX aircraft at Alice Springs, Australia for obvious pandemic-related reasons. Build I was originally planning to build this as an Emirates bird but a few days into the project made me decide that the CX livery was too good to pass up. I actually built Cathay 777s in the same livery before, one in 1/144 (B-KPK) and one in 1/200 (also B-KQY) but neither project really left me satisfied with the end result. Years after, and having accumulated what I hoped was enough modelling experience, I decided to tackle the 777 again one more time, partly as a gauge for how much I've improved. This was painted with mostly Armored Komodo lacquer paints and the paint mixtures were eyeballed with various so unfortunately I don't have a proper formula to give. Gloss was with GX112 polished with Tamiya and Novus polishing compounds and micromesh. Decals were a combination of 26Decals from the Emirates decal sheet I bought for the initial Emirates livery I wanted to do and Cathay Pacific decals designed and printed by myself with inkjet decal paper. Everything else is out of the box, short of the wi-fi dome I 3d printed. Kit - Zvezda 1/144 Boeing B777-300ER Going into it, I was expecting to be met with fit issues and seams given my experience with the similarly tooled Revell kit, so I was pleasantly surprised that the Zvezda kit went together easily and without too much fuss. If I had to talk about anything that could have been done better, the breakdown of the fuselage and wings makes it so that the belly is attached to the wing assembly. This makes it difficult to assemble and do polishing work on the wings, and also means that if you wanted to leave the wings off until after painting and decaling, you would have to sand, fill and repaint at the seam. I really liked Revell's engineering approach to their A350 and A380 wings wherein the wings can be left off until the end, and it would be nice if Zvezda did the same. It isn't really relevant in my case because 26decals included almost all the decals necessary for a 777, but Zvezda's inclusion of decals in this kit is very lackluster and misses out on a lot of big details. If you are buying an aftermarket set of decals for this kit, better to make sure that the set you buy includes 777 stencils or buy those separately. Decals This is the first time I've used 26decals, and although I had to pay a huge premium for the Emirates decals that I never used anyway, the other decals went down really well and the borders are practically invisible once applied. They're very thin though so extra care needs to be taken in applying them as it is easy to rip or fold them accidentally. - Overall, this build turned out to be a lot more enjoyable than I was expecting, and I'm happy to be able to do justice to this aircraft once and for all, with the end result being a Cathay 777 that I can feel satisfied with. Thanks for looking, feedback and comments are appreciated!

I'm not sure if this can fall under the category of scale modelling in the forum since technically this wasn't built from a kit, but I figure it uses the same subset of skills to do. The Airbus A330-300 is a twin-aisle airliner designed and built by Airbus. Having first flown in 1992 and developed in parallel with the longer-range Airbus A340, the A330 is a prominent aircraft model in the widebody short-to-long-haul market, and has recently been updated with a successor model, the A330neo. This model depicts an A330-300 of Cathay Pacific Airways, registration B-HLV, in the older Brushwing livery. It's a snap-fit model by Hogan Wings in 1/200 that used to be in the livery of Saudi Arabian Airlines. Here are the photos: For comparison, here's a Before/After: I detailed some of the processes in making it in the thread here, although I wasn't really able to update it all the way through: This was painted with mostly Tamiya acrylics and MRP lacquers, with Alclad Aqua gloss being the final clearcoat. I designed the decals myself although some of them came from images of decals available online. Various modifications were made like the corrected tail fairing and added antennas and domes. I decided to keep the weathering very light this time around because in my experience it's very easy to overdo it in 1/200 scale. In terms of this kind of restripping work the model itself made the work very straightforward and easy. The breakdown of parts meant that I could easily paint components separately and leave fragile parts off until the end of the build, much like with actual model kits. And because the model is for the most part pre-built and designed to have a snug fit rather than needing glue, there was little to no body work or sanding and filling involved. The most difficult part of the project was mostly the painstaking work involved with sizing and optimizing the decals over and over again to make sure it fit on this specific model, and so I would definitely recommend this kind of work as an in-between in scale model kit assembly and buying a pre-made kit model, and the possibilities are many with the large quantity of available snap-fit models in 1/200 scale. Although not as finely detailed as injection-molded scale model kits, the detail is sufficient in my opinion to fit in a collection of Hasegawa kits, for example. And with the relative rarity of cheap A330 kits available, Hogan Wings' plastic snap-fits are a very reasonable compromise. And another interesting detail to note with Hogan Wings models in particular is that parts are included to display the model with the wheels up or with landing gear. This means that they can be left off from the model until the end of the build or entirely and it makes painting a lot easier. Thanks for reading!

I feel like this skirts the definition of scale modelling that this forum pertains to, but I suppose this project uses many of the same skills involved. Please delete or move if this doesn't belong here. I've had an itch to build a 1/144 A330 for a while, but given the high price and shipping of the Authentic Airliners A330, and the rarity of the Revell kit, I decided to just repaint one into the colors I wanted. This is the Hogan 1/200 Saudia A330-300 that I'll be repainting into the old Cathay Pacific colors with registration B-HLV. Hogan provides a relatively detailed model to start with, and the snap-fit nature of it means that it's easy to work on different components separately. This is what the model looked like before stripping: In the time before the physical work of stripping and repainting started, I went to work on the decals for the model, all of which will be printed at home. After sizing and resizing over and over to fit the model, the decals were all finished recently, probably the most difficult aspect of the entire job: (It's low-res because this was just a screenshot off of Photoshop) And the fuselage and tail were recently stripped completely of paint after a decal test that ensured all of them lined up: I think the rest of this half-build will blow by fast. I've been thinking of adding the antennas and other detail along the top of the fuselage, but the issue would be where to get the measurements for those. I'm not sure if those modifications are worth making in 1/200, to be honest.

Hi everyone, I'm thinking about getting a Revell 747-8F kit and dress it up as the Hong Kong Trader. There are a couple of decals available: a Gio sheet [well, not really available...], the Nazca offering [of which I think to have seen a finished model with the "HK Trader" titles unfortunately not totally covering the paint underneath] and the Ascensio sheet. http://www.findmodelkit.com/content/boeing-747-8f-cathay-pacific-cargo Besides being readily available, the Ascensio sheet is also quite affordable compared to the other two [25 GBP for the last Gio sheet seen on ebay and 20 EUR for the Nazca product on its homepage]. BUT how about those "Hong Kong Trader" titles? They are printed on white decal paper. How does this work on the model at all? How would one need to trim the letters before applying them? Or should one apply the whole white rectangle with letters and then touch up with the underlying paint? Any experience with similar items or even this one? Cheers, Niki