Morning All,
Still driving on with the Hansa. The paint dried and I moved on to the
decals 'Nasties' over the past couple of days...First,
Welcome back to the bench Allen! Looks good.
Pete
Thanks Pete! It's great to be back and hopefully, I can finish this beasty...
Great to see you back in the thick of it Allen.
Thanks too Andy! Thick is definitely the right word Buddy...
Just caught up again Allen, really liking the work so far, looking great.
Much appreciated Ian!!! I can't believe you've already completed 2 builds and I'm struggling with just one!!!...
Just caught up with this one too Allen,and it's looking superb mate
,those lozenge
decals look very smart,the little rips will be fine and not noticeable after the weathering/varnish.
Top stuff buddy,and glad you're on the mend
Thanks Andy! I've been out of touch for a while and got a lot of Ketchup to still do. I just saw you've put the Albatros back on the bench. I take it the He-111 was whooping the butt a bit...
Great to see you back on this one Allen, looking really good
Thanks so much Mick! I too just saw you have built an Octopus killing thang...
Happy to learn that you are feeling a lot better.
The build is looking great. A great jog on the Maltese crosses and the lozenge coverings. Shame about the little tear but you sorted that well and it will not notice once the finishing has done its magic.
If you had Gorilla flue, then I think I had its big brother Godzilla.
Thanks Boss! Man must learn to look at what he's using (re. Set & Sol).
Decals get worse, as you will see below. I hope you are feeling better too Ian. It seems this flu crap has been spreading around like wild fire, north to south on the continent...
So I woke up on Saturday and prepped everything to drive on with the
decals. Warmish water, Micro
SET in front of me, paper towel bits and the little helpers I use to apply them. I started with the steering fin crosses first. They went on great, so I moved on to the naval hex piece for the fusi spine. That too went on fine, so I did the rear wing. The Micro Set did it's job,
Only the rear of the wing, where the flappy attaches needed some trimming. The little gap between the spine and the rear wing will get covered by the fusi stripe decal. I set these aside to dry and moved on to the floats. Now something in three of my four brain cells kept saying that this wasn't going to be fun! Then I remembered doing the floats on my Albatros W.4 and they weren't fun...Anyway, I slobbered Micro Set on the left float, soaked the decal and slid it on the float. Yup, I was right!!!...Slid it here, wiggled it there, slobbered more Set on it, tried to get it to settle into the ribs, and......Forget it. It didn't want to play,
The rib row in front and behind the strut mounts were the problem child. I fiddled around a bit more and, before I lost my temper, I put it aside and let it dry. Of course, there is always a Plan B, so I went in the stash and pulled out the sheet of naval hex camo that Lukasz gave me last year at the SMC. The Lukgraph
decals are good, but the color register is way different that the Cartograph kit
decals. Hmmm, gotta think about this for a while and moved on to painting up the belly windows and windshield frames,
I used AV Metal Color Dull Aluminum and a tiny brush for them. They came out good and cleanup was minimal. These will be installed later on in the build. Back at the decal fiasco, I started using Micro Sol to get the larger areas on the float to settle down on the surface. It seems to be working, but it will be a few days of tinkering to hopefully fix them. I then decided that cutting the other float decal into 6 pieces might work better. So far it has,
It's a bit more work, but they do settle down better. What's also nice, is that WnWs give you some extra hex decal material to play with. I figure I can get the floats looking decent by the end of the week. Hell, if it was a tank, I could just cover them in mud!!!...Yesterday was a new day and I moved on to adding some of the fusi
decals for the C-Staffel at Zeebrugge, in late 1917,
The cross has the stripe attached as one piece. There is also a top and bottom stripe piece to add. These went down very well too. The other side,
A couple of drops with Micro Sol will get the ends to fold down/up onto the main stripe. There is the plane's chassis number that goes in front of the cross on each side. These will be added after I get through handling the fusi to do other things. While still feeling lucky and more treatments on the float decal, I went on and added the big crosses to the top wing. These go over the hex camo and have to be placed pretty exact, so the bridge decal will fit and not cover an edge of cross. It's a 2 mm play room and I measured it all out a couple of times to leave no margin for error. Slobbered Micro Set all over the wing area hex decal and slid the cross on. I gently moved it into place and wiped it down with a piece of paper towel. Set it aside and did the other wing, using the first as a guide for the cross placement. Wiped it down and in the end, we had these,
I think they look pretty damn evenly placed, L to R and front to back. I'm happy with them and I'll check later to see if they need to be snuggled down onto the ribs a bit more. Then it's back to showing the floats a whole lot more love. They need it!!!..
More to come, so you've been warned!!! Thanks again for looking in, putting up with my madness and the kind comments. Stay healthy everyone!!!...
Prost
Allen