Jakko’s 1:48 Tamiya Brewster B-339 Buffalo

[Jakko]

I’ve never tried plug-moulding mainly because I think it’s too much of a hassle and I’d waste far too much material until I finally get it right (I have an aversion to wastage ), but otherwise I agree it would probably be a good technique for more complicated canopies than this one

 

[Fernando N]

Looking good Jakko, too bad about the office colour but it seems possible to me too.
Sadly de Tamiya research was lacking here..
Have fun with the camo

 

[SimonT]

Food packaging or cd cases are a cheap source of clear plastic for doing things such as this

 

[Jakko]

Looking good Jakko, too bad about the office colour but it seems possible to me too.

You mean it seems possible that it was green? Could be, but from the reading I did, it seems more likely to me that it should really be aluminium.

Have fun with the camo

I did a little research on that too, and discovered that what I need is the same USAF Vietnam colours that @BarryW used recently on his F-5E on here

 

[Jakko]

First paint is on on the outside:



A layer of Vallejo Model Air aluminium on the underside and the cockpit frame. ML-KNIL Brewsters were painted in aluminium colour underneath, so I won’t try to make the underside look like bare metal — this even coat will do nicely

Now I need to go through my paint collection to find two suitable shades of green for the uppers.

 

[Fernando N]

Neat start at the paintwork Jakko and thanks for the link, very useful info in there .

As for the remark about the office colour, many contemporary aircraft have a green office but as Brewster was a small firm that they used a different finish for different customers seems plausible to me too.

 

[Jakko]

Neat start at the paintwork

Now to not screw up the spraying on top … Especially masking off the flags later on.

thanks for the link, very useful info in there .

It appears to at least solve the question of whether these planes were painted with American paints that happened to look right or to actual KNIL specifications, certainly. I had suspected the latter already, but this is good confirmation and a decent guide to the kinds of colours I need. Still haven’t looked if I actually have any suitable ones, though.

 

[Jakko]

Damn, has it been this long since I did any real work on this model?!

I had sprayed the underside aluminium, as shown earlier, and then masked the underside a few days ago:



It’s mostly Tamiya tape plus a few bits cut from a plastic bag normally used for wrapping sandwiches. This afternoon I then got round to spraying the KNIL camouflagegroen (“camouflage green”, commonly called jongblad, “young leaf”), for which I used MIG-065 Forest Green:



As you can see, though, the paint didn’t really like the surface, especially not the parts where the aluminium went earlier:



Maybe I should have used a primer first, but I don’t normally for all-plastic models so I also didn’t bother with one here. I’ll just give it a second coat and see if that helps.

 

[Jakko]

Right, 20 minutes later and the second coat is on



Generally speaking it’s much better now, but some areas are very rough Especially underneath the right tailplane, but a few other spots as well:



I’m now debating whether to sand it down or to try and get the paint off with a cotton swab and methanol.

 

[Deleted member 7181]

There's definitely something on that surface the paint doesn't like!

My first choice would be sanding as it's more controllable and you might get away with keeping it localised. Stripping will probably just keep on spreading and also risks creeping under the tape.

 

[Jim R]

Hi Jakko
I'd just gently sand back the bad areas, just to get it smooth, and respray.
Jim

 

[Jakko]

My idea was to try it the other way around: first see if methanol gets the paint off in a controlled manner (away from the tape edge to begin with ) and if not, sand. But given that Andy probably knows much better than I do how to deal with stuff like this, I now think I’ll try sanding first.

 

[Jakko]

After sanding:



And then respraying with just one coat of Forest Green:



It’s still not 100% on the left side, but this will be covered by the dark green camouflage, so I can sand that down a little more without needing to spray yet another coat of Forest Green.

 

[Jim R]

Hi Jakko
I'm glad that worked Have you discovered what caused the paint problem? I have looked at the photos and I have to confess I've not seen anything like that before
Jim

 

[Jakko]

I was wondering about that too. I’ve seen similar effects before, though not with this exact paint — but that’s probably because I’ve used exactly one bottle of Mig paint, on two models so far On the first it didn’t do this, but that had a layer of primer on already, whereas here it was on bare plastic. Perhaps telling is that it went on fine on the sanded areas, so I may just have sanded away whatever was on the plastic that caused the paint to bead up like it did. It was also worse on the areas where the Vallejo aluminium paint went than on the bare plastic, and that aluminium paint is a bit greasy to the touch. So maybe there was a little mould-release agent left on the plastic and this Mig paint doesn’t respond well to that?

The other paint that did something similar was Hakata USMC Field Green, that I used on the underside of my “Merry Christmas” LVTP-5 last year, but that was over primer, even.

 

[Deleted member 7181]

Have you discovered what caused the paint problem?

I mentioned it earlier, albeit in a jokey fashion. Some kind of surface contamination that the paint didn't want to stick to so it repelled away from those spots and pooled in the "safe" non-contaminated areas.

The contamination could be practically anything from finger juice to tape residue, overspray from an incompatible paint, or mould release agent as Jakko says. It normally only causes a problem in true water based paints as they are really fickle. Anything lacquer based or even alcohol based (like Tamiya) will normally flow over such areas as the solvents within them are strong enough to dissolve most contamination.

 

[Jakko]

I just sprayed the camouflage:



For this I used Tamiya XF-11 Japanese Navy Green, which is kind of ironic for a model of a Brewster, but it’s one of the darker green greens I found in my paint collection. The ML-KNIL camouflage consisted of the camouflage green I mentioned before, over which dark green was applied, which was originally made by mixing black into the camouflage green. The dark colour is often called oudblad, “old leaf”, but the official name appears to have been simply donkergroen, “dark green”. Model kit instructions etc. often say to use olive drab (Tamiya does too) but according to research the colour was definitely dark green, and faded to green, not brown like American OD does. (Some sources claim Brewsters were painted with American OD at the factory, but this seems unlikely given that the supposed paint wasn’t used yet by the USAAF when these planes were delivered.)

I decided to use my old Badger 150 for this, instead of my usual Aztek. I hadn’t used the Badger for over twenty years, but after a recent bath in the ultrasonic cleaner it seems to work well enough still. It did produce a fair amount of overspray, though, so I had to touch it up a little with the Mig Forest Green. Just before I did that, I looked up the propeller colour and discovered it wasn’t camouflage green as I thought I remembered, but dark green … So I had to rinse out the thing again and spray the propeller and spinner.



By the way, the propeller won’t have yellow tips. Brewsters were originally delivered with these (on dark green propeller blades) but KNIL ground crews oversprayed all spare propellers green overall. Since this model is to represent (my take on) one of the planes in the very last ML-KNIL mission, I decided to go for green overall.

 

[Jakko]

Now with the masking tape taken off:



I was dreading this bit a little, to be honest, because when I was putting the tape on, I found the aluminium paint scratched very easily. I had visions of large flakes of it coming off with the tape, but nearly all of it stayed on. Hurrah! The Tamiya-supplied masking on the belly window also didn’t pull off with the tape, for which I’m glad as it means I won’t have to re-mask it in case I add a layer of varnish or something later on.

Now I’m going to have to mask the white stripe on the fuselage and rectangles for Dutch flags on the fuselage sides and the undersides of the wings.

 

[stillp]

Looking good Jakko.
Pete

 

[Jakko]

Now I’m having fun masking:



This is the white stripe on the fuselage side, with two narrow strips of tape (cut from a wider piece) for the sides. I began by tacking the front length of tape in place at the top, where a little protrusion on the spine helps locate it, then measuring from a vertical panel line to make sure it ended up vertical. After that I added the wide bits at the top and bottom, which are 8 mm wide, to get the spacing correct for the rear piece.

Next, I used the same 8 mm “spacers” to mask the bit where the plane’s serial number is to go:



(Plus 10 mm tape at the front to mask more of the plane, of course.) The gap in the white line is because that was added when the planes were already in service, so rather than overpainting the number and re-applying it, they just interrupted the line for it.

Next, the roundels, which are rectangular in this case:



In February 1942, the ML-KNIL replaced the previous orange triangles by red-white-blue national flags. Tamiya only provides the triangles, though, so I’ll have to add the flags myself. I measured up the size of the flag in drawings of the camo and markings, then cut a rectangle of masking tape to the correct size (10 mm by 15 mm) and added more tape around it. Afterward, I took the rectangle out again and cut a bit from the vertical tape line as well:



All this will be sprayed white. When that’s dry, I’ll mask off the white centre stripe of the flag and spray the red and blue. At least, that’s the plan I still need to do the flags on the undersides of the wings, but as I broke the antenna cable off the mast (again), I decided to stop and wait for the glue to dry on that before continuing.

Of course, all this would have been much easier if I had remembered the white before spraying the underside of the model … My normal method would be to paint these bits white, then mask them off and add the main colours to the model. For some reason, this had slipped my mind so I’m now having to add them over the base colours instead.