I guess i can open up a can of "worms" here. MY Personal opinion is that panel lines blackened & darked are not my favorite. I have seen hundreds of photos & real a/c, to state that I don't see any? maybe someone out there can advise me as to how this started? but in reality if you were to have panel lines big enough to collect dirt on say A F-4 phantom it would disturb the airflow over the plane & it would not fly. to see dark lines in a 1/72 aircraft the panel would have to be at least 1/2 inch apart. I can see it around the control surfaces, but not all panel lines on the wings & fuselage. also counter shading doesn't look fight unless the aircraft has been abandoned in a field for years. I can see a little wear & tear in a combat situation, but in peacetime all a/c woukd be in "clean condition". Maybe I'm stuck on museum a/c? I have been building models for 49 years & noticed a lot of changes it the hobby. the latest trend {subjects]is nice , but they are being priced right out of the hobby.plus a lot of the kits are overdone with detail parts that can't be seen. I will not even mention Armor kits which are getting parts redicilous. 350 pieces per tank thread.. That's why sometimes I enjoy building the older kits. I am building the Hasegawa 1/72 B-26B kit, I feel it is over rated there were sink marks near all the locating pins & around the ceiling hatch too many hidden pieces there also & it still needed puttyon most seams.. Anyone else had problems with the kit.
cheers,
Bob K.

Well i've worked on aircraft for 20 years...everything from military fighters, maritime airacraft, VIP transport to the commercial airliners that i currently see every day (unfortunately). I have to say this, but people outside the aircraft industry have an overrated idea about aircraft and how special they must be.

They are dirty, filthy pieces of crap that are made only good enough and cleaned and maintained well enough to do a job for a certain amount of time and then be thrown away when their airframe hours have expired, or when they become obsolete. If you bought a car built and finished to the same quality as the best aircraft i have ever seen, you would take it back to the dealer in utter disgust. And that's the best i've seen.

Yes you can see panel lines. More so with your your eyes than in photos, believe it or not. I'll tell you a good reason why. Panel lines are sealed with soft rubberised sealant. The type now used everywhere in the industry is a 2 part sealant that is dark grey. Yes it gets painted over. But aircraft flex along those linesand the paint wears away there first and shows the lines. Then after major servicings many panles are removed and the paint is sometimes touched up, but usually not- in my experience. Panel screws also get the same treatment and are even less likely to be touched up. Panels are sealed in some way for one of more of 3 reasons, 1. stop fuel leaking out 2. prevent moisture getting in and causing corrosion 3. provide presure and vapour sealing.
As an experiment i've stood even a hundred metres from the aircraft i currently work with and can still see panel line (not to mention all the patches of bird crap etc).

I'm talking about modern aircraft here. WW2 aircraft must have had some type of sealants applied to panels as well- especially the wings that contained fuel. Otherwise the fuel would leak out from the panels and srew hole (which still happens with modern aircraft- i still remember F18's in hangars with 4 buckets under the wings to catch the fuel leaking from the panel screws and then they'd go flying).

And they fade. And fade, for whatever reasons, unevenly. I don'tknow why. And the same aircraft type can completely different shades too- they are not all painted and re-painted at the same time or by the same contractor. And they are always done by the cheapest at the time...

What i believe is over done by most modellers is paint chipping. I know there are exceptions for sure all through history, but mostly it doesn't happen to the extent that most modellers like to portray it. In peace time bare metal gets touched up as fast as possible to stop corrosion.

And finally my all time pet hate- bulged tyres. If an aircraft that has noticeable bulged tyres then they are not inflated correctly. Even aircraft designed to land on dirt strips like Caribou still don't have noticeable trye bulging. If tryes bulge under the aircrafts stationary weight then they will generate too much heat when they flex on landing. They will blow out all the time instead of just occasionally like they do in reality.

The cleanest aircraft i've seen (the only truly clean ones really) are privately owned toys or show pieces- like aerobatic display aircraft.
The dirtiest are civil airline aircraft! Believe it or not. Put it this way, if you are a shareholder to a big airline do you want them spending money cleaning something that isn't absolutely necessary to meet civil aviation safety standards?

Military aircraft fall somewhere in between depending upon the country and if there's a war on at the time.

Finally you are still correct i suppose. Most of us exagerate the effects on models. But lets face it, every part of every model is over scale in reality. I simply just trust what my eyes tell me when i look at a model. And flat finished models without any sort of panel lines or paint shade variation just don't look very real to my eyes.

So that's my long winded input on the matter!

Andrew

Hi Robert and Andrew!

Very interesting. I'm on Andrew's side I must say and to add some "leaking fuel" to the debat, here's a picture of a Mirage 2000 wing root...



These are "seams" everybody would fill right away on a model!

Jean-Luc

I have been up close and personal to some military aircraft while serving in the Royal Engineers (Airfield Damage Repair and Harrier Suipport) and they were not clean. While doing the ADR role at Wildenrath (Germany) I presented the Sergeants Mess with a 1/24 scale model of a Mk1 Spitfire (what else ) in 92 Sqn markings (19 and 92 Sqdns were based there at the time). The model was weathered and had hilighted panel lines (not black, I don't use black). Unbeknown to me there was a veteran of the Battle of Briton in the mess for the presentation and he asked to speak to the person who built the model. To cut a long story short he told me that the model was, "just how they used to look". (Still brings a big grin to my face )
However I'm not suggesting that my models are the ultimate representation of what an aircraft model should look like and I did take what the veteran said with a small pinch of salt. My take on the panel line, pre-post shading, weathering etc thing is that, in my opinion, a model just looks better. What I think that I mean by that is that it looks far more interesting.
Recently I was judging at a small model show and another judge (he was not judging the same catagories, not even aircraft) came over and started going on about how highlighted panel lines made aircraft models appear as if they were just a bunch of paving slabs flying in formation. He pointed to one model, a Bf 109, that had now panel line shading and was just painted in it's colours, and said "that should win". It looked like a model, a painted plastic model. The other aircraft were painted using better airbrush skills and had verying attempts at making the model look more "realistic", all, to my eye, and that of my fellow judge were far more "interesting" and "realistic" looking than the "plainly" painted model.
Each to their own but I personally like to see a model that is painted in an interesting way.
Sorry for the long winded reply, Ill put the lid back on my particular can of worms

Mal

Thanks for the actuallity. I stand corrected. I agree with you on the bulged tires, but sometimes they are better than the so called rubber tires which dry out & crack. I usually sand the bulges smaller. After my planes sit on the shelf for a while the panel lines do get weathered by dust.
Cheers,
Bob K.

Jean; It's amazing that the mirage would still fly correctly, I would imagine the cracks might spoil the aerodynimics of the a/c.pics don't lie.
cheers,
Bob K.