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Hobby Boss 1/72 Zlin Z-142 - Completed


Speedman

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8 Z-142 primary trainers are operated by the Lom Praha company at their Flight Training Center in Czechoslovakia. Lom Praha conduct basic and advanced flight training for the Czech Air Force.

I bought this months ago from Hannants on special offer for less than £3 as part of a big order. When it arrived I was surprised by the size of the box, I had to double check it was 1/72! :blink: I'd never heard of Hobby Boss, let alone seen one of their kits in the flesh but I must say I'm impressed with this little beauty. It's a bit hard to make out the detail with it being mostly clear but it does look rather good, the cockpit needs some attention but other than that it should be a nice easy OOB build.

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Edited by Speedman
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I've no idea! Apart from the canopy there's no reason they had to do this. The only thing it might have been useful for was to leave an unpainted section for the landing lights in the port wing, but I'm still going to have to cut out a section to detail and correct it anyway. Because clear plastic is very hard the surface details feel a lot sharper than most kits, this might be why Hobby Boss make it this way. :shrug:

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I've finally managed to cram enough Liquid Gravity into the nose to stop it tail sitting. One disadvantage of Hobby Boss using clear plastic is that it's denser than normal and takes a lot to counter it's weight, after filling the top and bottom of the nose section it wasn't even close to keeping it's nose down. It's lucky that the instrument panel gives a good amount of hidden space once fitted, with this filled as well, the balance point is just forward of the wheels. I even considered drilling in from the tips of the wings and filling the resulting shafts!

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Top job Speedman, I have a rare plane vacform helicopter that's moulded in clear plastic I have often wondered why unless it was so you could detail the interior and only paint one side of the aircraft thereby leaving it available to be seen from the other.

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I've glue the upper & lower together at last and filled the joins with Mr. Surfacer. Sanding is a bit of a nightmare, with it being clear every bit of surface detail needs checking whether it's raised or engraved! There's a few little details I would have sworn were raised until I ran my finger over them :lol: I've also separated the canopy by slowly (almost an hour!) scribing the join with a very fine sewing needle so not to remove too much material.

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I started and finished the landing lights today. After drilling a line of holes and cutting in using a razor saw to remove a chunk of leading edge, I tidied up with a file and started work on the lights and cover.

The lights are just clear sprue, cut to size and painted silver.

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With the lights glued in place, I masked the lenses with Maskol ready for some black paint.

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Painted black and waiting for the cover to be glued in place. Looks good when using the flash :)

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After bending and gluing some clear card in place, I covered the whole lot in two layers of CA and sanded down once dry.

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Then a bit of Autosol Metal Polish and some elbow grease to make it nice and shiny again. The CA polishes to a glass like finish and fills any gaps at the same time, it also strengthens the thin clear card. The white strip is glued inside the cover just like the real aircraft.

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Thanks guys :)

Great job!!!

One of my colleagues has one and I managed to take a couple of walk arounds. Do you need more reference? Maybe I can help.

Thanks for the offer but I should be OK as I found a walk around of 0557 online, lucky I did as I would have painted the cockpit blue & grey as per the instructions! One thing I noticed from searching for under wing shots of the landing light is the number of subtle differences in 142s. Things like a small intake just under the canopy's rear glazing, single exhaust rather than twin, different twin exhaust configurations and large wing fences just inboard of the wing tips. It's a bit of a minefield :blink:

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This is coming on really well. What's the consistency of all that clear plastic, is it as brittle as clear often can be?

Max

To be honest brittleness has not been a problem as the parts are really thick. If it had been moulded to regular 1/72 thickness, it would probably have been in pieces by now, but the parts are at least twice as thick as usual and feel really solid to handle. As far as drilling, cutting, sanding and filing goes, you notice a difference. Cutting has to be light and done in many strokes, going too hard tends to crack off a chunk rather than cut. (Guess how I found that out... :D ) Drilling is lovely, the hard plastic cuts well and results in a crisp, clean hole. As for filing and sanding, because is ridiculously hard to make out the depth of detail in clear you have to keep stopping and feeling the part to gauge how much more you need to take off.

It's not without it's problems to work on but by taking a slightly different approach and thinking ahead you can compensate for them.

Edited by Speedman
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  • 2 weeks later...

Cheers. :)

Yellow! A base of Tamiya matt white, then three coats of Revell matt yellow (looks like trainer yellow) followed by two coats of Revell gloss yellow (lemon yellow). I also sprayed the prop spinner but left out the matt yellow. The photos I have show the spinner as a much lighter shade and the effect I've got is about right.

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