Arma PZL PZ7a Air Force Cadet School Deblin

[Michael louey]

I finally got around to building one of the Polish PZL fighters I've been looking to do for ages. I've found Polish aircraft really interesting ever since I built the Revell PZ11 when I was still in primary school. Unfortunately I never got around to follow it up though I've bought and sold generations of PZ11's (Heller, Special Hobby), PZ23's and PZ37's.

The PZ7 was meant to be a quick trial to try out some paints to use for future Polish Air Force builds. I read that the Hataka paints were a good match and the Red Line Acrylics were available at a local mail order shop so I thought I'd give them a go though in general I'm not a big user of acrylics. I would have gone for the Orange Line Lacquers which Seamus swears by but they weren't available.

Unfortunately I had real problems with the Hataka paints - The underside blue grey kind of went ok after 2 coats however the top coat of Polish Khaki (Early) lacked coverage even after using my electric mixer and thinning with Mr Levelling Thinner still resulted in a blocked air brush. I finally decided to give up on these paints and revert to plan B which was to match the FS numbers on the Arma instructions. This resulted in using Testors Field Drab which I'd read was a good match for Polish Khaki (Late) and FS16743 Aircraft Grey which is a colour I normally use to replicate RLM76. These were applied after a messy paint stripping process. I still ran into a few more problems - I ended up not using a lot of the etch supplied as they either turned out to be overscale if applied as surface detail or just too fiddly and getting knocked off such as some wing eyelets. About the only useful etch were the windscreen and some gun sights.
I also managed to break a couple of the wing and tailplane struts and the repair jobs weren't perfect.

While this took a lot longer than planned and isn't the greatest build I've done, it still looks nice when finished. I had to change schemes after the paint disaster and chose the only scheme in "late Khaki" as that is what the Testors paint matched.

Hopefully the IBG PZL P11 and P23's are more stress free builds but they've now been pushed back in the queue as I want to tryout the recent Airfix Spitfire Vc.

 

 

 

Edited April 11, 2021 by Michael louey