Texan II for RNZAF.

[Paul J]

Moving up a scale to 1/72nd this time, another long term dust collector waiting to be finished and now finally done.  This my rendition of the Beechcraft?(Pilatus?)  Texan II. As a  base for it I used the Aeroclub Pilatus PC-7 I picked up a couple years ago for £3.00 quid.   It needed some mods to get it to look like the Texan II so what I did was to add some plastic card 'squares to the tail plane forward edge tips , micro strip around the wing where the taper starts, cut down the fin a little bit and added the ventral fin from plastic card. Gave the nose a little more depth  but mainly to create a nosewheel bay which was non existent in the kit, a NACA scoop to top of fuselage just forward of the cockpit and another larger scoop to the nose underside as part of the aforementioned work. The cockpit insides was re done a little as the seats would not fit the supplied cockpit tub.  All the decals were from OldModels Decals of New Zealand. The dark blue was a mix of Humbrol 15 midnight blue and some gloss dark sea blue. It all looks pretty close to what I wanted. As a guide to the work I did on this, I used my 1/48th Ibex model which helped in the work I needed to do.  I still need to make some new main undercarriage doors that I just noticed after uploading the photos.

 

The silver or polished leading edges to the flying surfaces are all done with silver decal stripes.

The canopy frame was painted freehand and edged with white decal stripe.

 Its not 100% perfect or accurate but is good enough for me for now until a reasonably priced kit comes along. I am hoping that someone like Airfix will honour us with a new kit in the coming months/years with RAF an RCAF marking choices.   

[stevehnz]

Looks good Paul, something I'm tempted to have a go at with an Ozmods PC9, you've made it look very doable.

Steve.

[Wulfman]

A very nice build, silver decals are a great idea, will be using them on my Panther !

 

Wulfman

[SAT69]

I see nothing to complain about there. The white canopy striping using decals is a technique I'll use in the future.

[k5054nz]

Lovely job! Living fairly close to RNZAF Base Ohakea, home to 14SQN, I get to see and hear the Texans quite regularly as they use our local airport for practice. I'm always impressed to see one built!

[LDSModeller]

Hi Paul,

 

Very very Nice

 

The Texan II's now make up the RNZAF's Display Team, the Black Falcons, have seen them

do their thing

(The Red Checkers were disbanded)

 

Thanks for sharing your build with us

 

Regards

 

Alan

[Paul J]

Found some pics of my work in progress when I was part way in to building this in 2019!

 

 

You can se the extent of some of the work I have tried to describe in first post for this topic. The white areas are the plastic card and strip mods to the wings and tail plane tips of the kit and filler/ plastic card under the nose.