¹⁄35

Transforming a 60's Short Sunderland

Painting and Decals

All paints were acrylic. I used Model Master and Floquil on this kit. I attempted to do pre-shading for the first time with this kit. I sprayed Model Master Flat Black on all major panel lines, etc. and followed with light mist coats of Floquil Grimy Black. This did not turn out as good as I hoped, the boat being for too gray, so I did a liberal spraying of Floquil Night Black haphazardly and quickly. The result is a black-gray boat that has a bit of depth as opposed to an all flat black paint job. I sprayed Model Master Gloss and waited 24 hours to place decals.

I chose to do a boat based in Koogala, Ceylon in 1944. Black P “Peter” was a well-known boat that participated in dusk/dawn bombing missions, thus the paint job. My references disagreed on weather the color of the internal roundel was off-white or light blue. Luckily by friend Derek Pennington came to the rescue with reference photos that seemed to indicate white roundel centers and fin flash. The “P” was taken from a PBY Catalina sheet graciously provided by friend Tom Heinrich. The roundels and fin flash were taken from a Matchbox Lancaster kit. All reacted well to Solva-Set. After the decals had dried I applied a flat coat.

Final Assembly

I painted and assembled the beaching gear, turrets and cockpit canopy and installed them. I opted to leave the cockpit canopy unglued at this time so I can remove it to see the interior. I used Micro Krystal Kleer on all the side portholes and to attach the turrets. I then added the very fragile Yagi antennae to the rear fuselage, top cockpit and under wing locations. These are extremely delicate, but look excellent and to-scale.

I had good intentions to weather the heck out of this boat, but I ended up keeping it just like all the others in my collection, clean builds.

Conclusions

The Airfix Sunderland is ancient, but can be built. I believe most sit in a musty corner of the basement simply because of the basic detail. The White Ensign Models detail sets bring this kit leaping into the 21st century in the realm of detail, even if you cannot see most of it (I know it’s there). On a scale of 1 to 10 I give the Sunderland an 8 and the WEM sets a 9. I honestly have never worked with photetch that was so easy to use. I highly recommend it. The finished kit is BIG, so make sure you have space!

Bryan “Tuck” Tucker

References:

Warpaint Short Sunderland

Osprey Short Sunderland Units of WW2