Project : 1918230HPWnWDH91/32

[paddy]

Trade secret alert

Take a small length of 0.2mm tinned copper wire or similar and hold it between finger and thumb like this.

Small electric drill or electric screw driver with an L shaped bit of hard wire like piano wire in the chuck. use a dia the same as the eye you want, this in 0.5mm

Hold the wire tight and run the drill at a very slow speed, about 1 rev a second for starters 60rpm

you can cut off the excess. i put all the loops on a length of hard wire and cut them all the same length.

 

[paddy]

One of the things i really like about MRP paints is its ready mix so the colour is constant , so not dependent on dilution . Secondly its very fine/thin so while it needs about 6 coats it makes it very easy to vary the coverage of coats to give a more varied finish/shades

You notice on aircraft with a doped linen top and underside surface the ribs are more visible on the wings as the light shines through but on aircraft with an olive drab top surface the light is pretty much blocked and any shading appearance over the ribs is due to the undulation of the fabric between ribs, These are in semi gloss finish at the moment so i will mat coat after the decals

 

[paddy]

Bad news...the decals are hopeless, just falling apart on the backing paper. I refuse to spend another £20 on generic WWI roundels so it down to what i can find in my spares box. This is the problem with old models now, i supose these are 15-18 years old. I dont remember the decals being a problem back in the day but they are very thick.

 

[moon puppy]

Wow, I haven't heard of this happening to the WnW stuff but I suppose it could happen to any batch. Shouldn't be much of a task to mask?

 

[paddy]

Probably just duff decals, i found some left over from my Brisfit build which must be as old and they seem ok. Not quite right but no one will know

 

[Rhino]

Sheyit.

 

[moon puppy]

Sheyit.

Gesundheit!

 

[paddy]

Things are going from bad to worse I found some older WnW decals but because they were on white backing paper i didnt notice that 2 had white rings round the edge and 2 didnt, you couldn't see that really on the paper. Now i have the white ring roundels on the bottom and they should be on the olive drab on the top

I might have some more with white rings.

What i have found is there are 2 shades of colour blue. Now i always though the was the change from RFC to RAF but its apparently just a tendency for early roundels to fade. So they started life all the same blue. Its confusing because some models including WnW use the faded blue but only sometimes. Upper dark surfaces had the white ring round the outside but often that was painted over as it stood out at night.
Another problem was photographers in the early days tended to use Orthochromatic film which made blues much paler so original colour pictures often show the blue as much lighter than it really was which has misled historians and model manufacturers over the years.

. These are roden light blue with WNW darker

and these are both WnW, from memory the lighter were SE5 and the darker is the current DH-9 build.
That darker one has the white outer ring so you can see how i didnt spot it before it was too late.

Every day is a learning day. Now i need to get those roundels off the top wing....

 

[moon puppy]

Try some sticky tape over those decals, should come right up if you haven't seal coat them.

 

[paddy]

Warm water and a wire brush Dont panic, i am good at rescue missions.

 

[Heavens Eagle]

Glad to see that you were able to get it back to a smooth green. Sorry that you are dealing with the decal problems though. I have gotten to the point where I really don't trust decals to work properly. They are a bane to my building. Thus I really like building stuff that doesn't have them or that they are minimal.

 

[paddy]

Yea i never seem to get a good set of decals unless they are cartograph. Anyway once again i find myself rescuing a build and it was the most fun part so far

 

[Rhino]

Dubble sheyit.

 

[paddy]

So this is where i got to last night.

The top wing has the faded blue which by accident might be a good move, the bottom is std RAF blue., the top now has white borders against the olive drab which is correct. The bottom also have white borders which is probably wrong but i was really limited by what odd decals i had in my spares box.
I want to find a way to weather the olive drab a bit, its to uniform i think

This is a pup showing weathered Drab but hard to tell what is grainy picture and what is wear and tear

and out of intrest this is a DH-4, very simukar to the DH-9 but you can see the DH-4 has the pilot sitting a lot further forward where the bomb bay is on the DH-9