The Ship Model Forum

Hello:

We haven't seen the air wing in a while. I had the air brush out to do some priming, so I thought I'd start priming the air wing. One thing lead to another, and now nearly all of the air wing has been primed.

Mike

Looking good.

I can appreciate the work involved. I'm just finishing up my own 1/350 air wing: P-I-A. I hate it.

Hello:

Yeah, the air wing is a pain. I guess you could say that it's a good way to learn patience. It is tedious and repetitive, maybe even more so than making all of the AA guns (more on that coming soon).

Since the last update, I've painted the undersides of all of the planes light gull gray. I know it looks like nothing happened, but sometimes it takes a lot of work to make it look like nothing happened.

Last night I got 15 of the F4F's painted gray-blue. Most of them just have 1 coat, but I put a second coat on a few plus two of the SBDs. So, if it takes me a night to paint 15, and I have 52 to do, then that's about 3.5 nights of work. I need two coats (the second coat is quite a bit faster), plus detailed painting like the wheels, and we're looking at over a week. Plus the canopies...

I hope to power through on getting the blue onto the air-wing before I burn out and turn to something else on the Big-E, or worse yet, work on an airplane

Mike

I feel your pain. Only bigger.

For my Bonaventure, I had to 3D print all the aircraft (no-one makes 1/96 RCN aircraft from the 60s) then sand/putty/sand, then prime, then paint, then decal.

Each aircraft took an average of about 20 hours to print. Probably 1 hour of sanding/putty work. Then painting - first spray, then detailing by hand, probably two each. Then decals (20 per aircraft) that took me about 45 minutes per aircraft. So...about 4 hours per aircraft of actual interaction with the plane.

In my case, I started with the air detachment first, then switched focus to the model. I had a basic hull and deck - it's mostly detailing work.

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Ex RCN, HMC Ships Gatineau, Athabaskan, Charlottetown, St. John's, Montreal, Charlottetown, Summerside, Montreal.