Civvie Hell Part II...

There was a good deal of filling and sanding required, and perhaps it that was all the greenstuff dust that addled my brain. Or perhaps I'm just addled. Anyway, I super-glued the wings together, using super-glue with hopes of avoiding too much filler for the wings. Actually, that part of the plan worked quite well, and I was able to sand the leading edges nicely, using the squeezed out super-glue as filler. All very nice. Only when it was all done did I realise that I had failed to add inserts into the wings that would act as the locating positions for the undercarriages. What the actual fork?! At this point I nearly opted for seppuku, or something similiar but not quite so eye-watering. In the end, I broke the wings open...

The rest of the build went reasonably well, but with the thing more or less complete, I wasn't looking forward to the decals. With good reason:

 

One of the things that the masters in the scale aviation press endlessly foam about is modern decals - 'lovely and thin' blah, blah. Yes, lovely and thin. Just ripe for folding on themselves!! I knew, of course, that there was no way to get the very long decals on in one piece, so I cut them into smaller sections. But, it wasn't enough, as the key pieces curled in the water on both axes.

 

The only solution was scrape the mess off when dry, and use a sharp marker pen.

 

Still, in the end, it looks ok:

 

 

But, enough of the shiny finished civvie stuff.

 

Next up, late mark Messerschmitt madness:

But, which one. Oddly, only one is short-run....

Civilian hell...

... or review build: Roden, Carvair ATL98, 1/144.

I understand that Hollywood stars refer to the non-actor world as 'the civilians'. I refer to the 'stars' as degenerates who are part and parcel of the decline of the West. But that's neither here nor there, as here is...

civilian model hell.

I've had a short run of 1/144 kit bashing recently - Tupelov 'Badgers', Vickers Valiant - so I thought that I would go for an interesting civilian 1/144 in the shape of the Carvair. This was a British conversion of the Douglas DC-4, turning that passenger aircraft into a car and passenger carrier for the days when one might think of taking the Rover, Jag, or Austin Cambridge, over to the Continong (Europe, that is) by air. It was the bright idea of Sir Freddie Laker, a rather famous, and innovative figure in British post-war aviation, whose efforts to bring cheap air travel to the masses were crushed by the dead hand of state-sponsored airlines.  So, what do Roden give us in 1/144:

 

A rather nice bit of box art, very atmospheric, top banana.

 

In addition to the wings and fuselage, three sprues of softish, grey plastic. These make up into:

 

Touch where it fits hell!  Yes, I forgot to mention that despite my repeated assertions to the contrary, I've been messing around with a short-run kit again! O me miserum. 

 

Just look at those gaping trenches in the fuselage halves and the wing roots.

 

 

But, things got worse....

 

 

To be continued...