PEACEMAKER
four million separate panels in the cockpit and nose glazing. The kit was fortunately sup- plied to me (no idea if this is standard as I bought it second hand) with a laser cut mask set for this, in blue vinyl. Unfortu- nately, this turned out to be completely useless, with the masking panels not evenly cut between the two sides. I ended up doing some incredibly te- dious masking of my own in- stead.
Shiny shiny… Once I got a coat of grey primer on and ti- died up a few errant seams, I polished it all
over with the finest wet and dry I could find, getting the surface mirror-like, ready for the Alclad. I used a number of different shades of Alclad on this build, including Aluminium on the fuselage, Polished Aluminium on the nose section and the fin, White Aluminium on selected panels on the wings, and Dark Aluminium on the flaps and ailerons. I also used some Steel on the jet intakes, and Jet Ex- haust on the…er…well…jet exhausts. Obvious really. The Al- clad went on well, and was pro- tected with a coat of Johnson’s Klear from my jealously guarded stocks. Then came the white under-
side. I made the mistake of not putting on the white first, and getting coverage over the Al- clad proved tricky. It also re- quired
quite a bit of accurate masking to represent the SAC underside, with the top/bottom demarca- tion line in the right place. This came back to haunt me later. The next problem was that
the undercarriage doors had red and white diagonal stripes on them according to most ref- erence photos I found. No decal was supplied for this, so I had to cut Tamiya masking tape into less than 1mm wide strips, and mask and spray the red stripes myself. Once everything was
painted, I decided against a panel line wash as at this scale it would look way overdone. I did decide to use a black wash in specific panel lines, rather than use the very long and very delicate wing walk decals. Didn’t work, though.
Boom! Decalling came next. This was
a trial as the decals were made out of some form of explosive, judging by the way they burst into multiple pieces when freed from the backing paper. The wing walk decals were hard work to get straight, and the curved lines around the engine nacelles were constructed jig- saw like from about six or seven broken pieces each. Patience won through in the end, and so I was dismayed to find that the white in the star and bar in- signia wasn’t dense enough to cover the metallic Alclad under- neath. This wasn’t a problem on the wing, but on the fuselage the top/bottom demarcation line ran right through the star, making it obvious. I had to re- sort to some very careful mask- ing over the star, and
Convair B-36D-5-CF (S/N 49- 2652) of the 7th Bomb Group (Heavy), Carswell Air Force Base, Texas (USAF)
FEBRUARY 2015 • VOLUME 36 • ISSUE 12 65
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86