Internet Modeler's Reader Gallery

This month we have a handful of aircraft from Patrick in China. Some truly outstanding work. If you'd like to have your models appear in our gallery, please e-mail Bob Pearson or Chris Banyai-Riepl.

Hasegawa 1/48 Type 99 Val model 11

This is the Hasegawa's 1/48 Type 99 carrier dive bomber. The kit is of Hasegawa's normal standard and the interior is good enough to build OOB. However I happen to have the Eduard's PE set for the kit, so I used it to enhance the details (mostly interior). The model was then finished with Gunze lacquer paints with emphasis on weathering effects. I first using white paint added to the basic colour to fade out the otherwise too bright green and gray scheme, since the Japanese a/cs served in the Pacific Theatre got weathered rapidly, and then I did the panel line shading using red brown and black added to the basic colours. After the model got a overall shot of clear flat, I did the paint chipping using gun metal blended silver paint and a fine tip brush. After that the model received a couple of washes with Windsor/Newton artist oil colours(dark red, burnt sienna and black mixed and thinned with Zippo fuel.) Finally a monofilament thread antenna completed the work. Kit decals used to depict a/c from the Second Flying Group.

Dynavector 1/48 Westland Wyvern

Well folks you all know the tricks of building a vac kit.... This is no exception. Though rumours has it that the Wyvern is the easiest of the kind, it does require considerable works for parts cleaning and beefing up the joining.....All the penal lines rescribed and lota rivets from 0.2mm to 0.5mm and bolts(up to 6 different types!) were added. A scatch built Reccon Camera was added to the aft cockpit chamber before the fuselage halves put together. Again all the painting done with the fine Gunze lacquer paints, with the yellow/black ID strips done first and then mask'em off for the rest. All eight prop blades thinned to the proper thickness and wing/tailplane fences replaced with sheet plastic stock. A lining added to the inner side of the outer gear doors to enhance the look. I chose the kit supplied decals to depict the aircraft appeared during Suez Crisis onboard RMS Eagle.

Eduard 1/48 Sopwith Triplane "Black Maria"

Said to be a quantum leap of Eduard's short run molding techniques, this kit is far more better than the Siemens Schuckert I built years ago. Parts are all free of flash and the interior was no longer an integral PE piece. Construction was pretty straight forward and the most time I spent was on the wood grain simulating and flying wires with monofilamint fishing line(0.1mm dia.) I use a sorta sail colour for the base colour of the inter-plane struts and then using heavily thinned red brown, gray and black to "paint" the wood grain on, after that a dry brush of burnt sienna oil colour over all of these and Tamiya acrylic clear orange and clear red mixed together sprayed on to simulate the varnished finish. All the flying wires were glued into pre-drilled 0.3mm holes where appropriate by Cyanoacrylate adhasive applied with a tooth pick. I mixed the PC10 and CDL from my own stock and the tone was lighter than what appeared on other ones' models to give it a more "scale" look. The Propagteam decals supplied with the kit turned out a bit translucent and brittle which requires more careful handling.

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Eduard 1/48 Albatros Triplane

I remembered a couple of years ago Eduard has a series of 1/48 scale kits called "Never fight ladies" or something alike, including the really funny DFW-28 Floh. This one, by means of the service life of the type, should be a good continuation of the discontinued series. The tail-heavy nature of the design caused bad flying characteristic (easy to stall plus poor pilot sight) never made it popular to the German Jasta pilots and saw no combat actions recorded to the prototype. However the kit itself is a real gem to build. Of the "Profipack" catagory of Eduard's line, The petit details just crying out on their own. While construction reveals no problem at all, Most time logged with working out the bare plywood skin on the fuselage.(other than the fuselage the model is fully covered with thick and stubborn lonzenge decals with rib tape decals printed on a seperate sheet which the carrying film was in one piece! Sorry, take your time to cut each stripe out....) This is nothing more than careful and decisive hand painting with a fine tipped brush and much thinned dark brown paints on a sail coloured base coat, yet you got to be very much pre-determined on the direction of those tiny grain. A coat of Tamiya acrylic clear orange and a further coat of clear lacquer varnish finished this part of job. Other than this time-consuming procedure, the rest of the story remain all the same. After some 40 working hours the finished model looks really nice. Thanks Eduard for their extrordinary work to bring we Bi-plane (or even Triplane) fans such beauties to behold.

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Eduard 1/48 Albatrod D.III "Werner Voss"

Though Eduard has another kit of Werner Voss' mount (a Pfalz D.III), I personally reckon this Albatros has the most striking colour scheme of all the a/cs he ever flown....The kit's quality is no exception to Eduard's famous LTM processing short run kits, as more peole are calling this Czech firm the "Tamiya of WWI". But wait, They are not happy enough to be only of this, take a look at their He280, Yak-3 and the NEW P-39!!! Well, Nothing more than those old tricks to do the wood grain, and the decals are better than those of the Sopwith Triplanes yet still thin enough to snug down with a bit aid of any good brand of decal softener. 0.3 dia. copper wire were used to add the pipe line from center wing radiator to the Mercedes D.III inline Engine.

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