This one has been a "backburner" project over the past 2 weeks. I've been cleaning up the resin pieces during down time on Hasegawa Bf109G-10. I picked this kit up on the LHS's annual 25% off sale day(Victorian Hobby Centre- don't miss it next year!), along with a few other short run Czech kits. My version is the Africa boxing, which contains Free French and Vichy aircraft based from the African colonies.



There are 2 good reviews already on aeroscale for this kit by MERLIN and Eetu. As soon as i inspected the kit, after getting it home, i knew it would move well up in my "to build" pile. To be honest i'm much more interested in early war aircraft like this. The aircraft that were each countries best shot at the start- Brewsters, Moranes, P-40's, early Bf109's etc, interest me much more than later war "designed with benefit of hindsight and combat experience" aircraft like Mustangs, Corsairs etc.

I can fully backup what's already written on this site about the kit. Excellent surface detail overall. But i don't think the resin detail is as good as recent products from CA or Special Hobby. My biggest disapointment is having a vacform canopy- i hate them! But at least the eduard pre-cut masks solve the problem of cutting around soft acetate frame lines.

Fit so far has way exceeded my expectations- i really expected this one to put up more of a struggle. Though i have to admit to cheating in the cockpit a bit. Rather than assebling the cockpit as a stand alone assemby for fitting in one go, i built it onto one side of the fuselage instead- bulkhead by bulkhead, frame by frame. I left the side wall frames only glued at their tops so the bottoms are flexible and could be attached to the bulkeads from underneath once the fuselage halves were together. It's hard to explain, i should have taken pics but this has just flown together in the last 2 days, i hate stopping when i'm on a roll!

Strangly the left wheel well insert fit without modification, the right one needed extensive filing of the weel well and wing top. Don't know why there was so much difference from one side to the other.

The fuselage and wing joins are pretty much trouble free- i've had far worse from Hasegawa kits if you must know. The only place needing filler is at the aft underside of the wing to fuselage join. Here there was the option of pressing home the join and ending up with a nasty step that would damage the fabric and stringer detail to repair, or the way i did it- which was to even the step and accepting an easy to fill join along the aftmost wing to body fairing.

The all important top wing to body join is as perfect as you will ever come across (no filler)- once again you find far worse in mainstream kits.





I'll be doing the Madagascar Vichy aircraft, well you can'y go past those yellow and red markings can you? I'll be trying the colour mixes for French Colours that were in the recent Bloch feature on aeroscale, i think the colours on that one look spot on. Not that i'm an expert on the subject though.

More to come soon.

Andrew

wow, interesting, never heard of this kit. looks like an interesting project.

give us more detail shot of the cockpit and such please!

Looking good. Makes me want to start on the Finnish boxing of mine. But there's just too many builds going on at the moment to pick up another one...

Indeed, the resin details, at least the cockpit parts, are not new. They seem to be slightly modified from the original CA/MPM releases, the biggest difference seems the instrument panel flattened to accept the PE parts and the shelf behind the cockpit.

In case you haven't proceeded to painting stage yet, you might want to sand the nose profile a little, if you haven't already.
After I had sent my review for publishing here, I was informed that the top front edge of the nose is somewhat too sharp. The rounded edge is present in the side profile drawings in the kit's painting guide, but no on the parts themselves.

Are you planning to make an open cockpit? With the two vacform canopies included, cutting it up shouldn't be very hard. If the parts are the same as on the MPM Mörkö kit I built, the canopy should be a good fit to the fuselage.

Keep up the good work.

Vance: I only took one pic of the cockpit and it's not a really great one. But here it is. Anyway the interior is so dark not much can be seen. Also i'll be keeping the canopy closed on this one. I have enough trouble with vacuform canopies as it is, the less cutting and trimming i do the less chance of messing it up completely in my view. In fact vac canopies are my number one dislike in model kits, but i really wanted to do this subject...
To me the supplied belts look too narrow as well? And i've seen no factual evidence for the channeled rear decking either.

Az say to use the same colour as the landing gear for the cockpit, but i don't think so. All the pics and info i've seen so far has French cockpits as midnight blue- which seemed to be almost black.



Eetu: I'm keeping the canopy closed. I could do some more cutting and open it, but i'll quit now whilst i've at least got it close to fitting! It's not perfect, i still have a little bit of blending to do with filler near the back of the canopy, but it should be ok.
You're right about the nose, it does look a bit sharp. But i'm leaving it now. It's not like i build for competitions or anything so i can live with it i think.



Anyone have any idea if an African based French aircraft in '41 would still have a tail skid or a wheel? The instructions say to use the wheel- but i know for at least one of the options given it was almost certainly a skid.

I've done the yellow for the Vichy markings. Hopefully the red stripes will get done today. That's the reason for leaving off the tailplanes at this point, makes the masking easier. They butt fit to the fuselage nicely and should cause no problems to fit later, i hope.



Andrew

Camoflage colours are on. The AZ colour guide is a bit hard to interpret actually. And from what i can gather each French aircraft of the time had a different pattern applied to it, quite random- not like the more rigid (and boring) RAF procedures.

Should get the gloss and maybe some decals applied tomorrow before work, i hope.
Also i realise i made a mistake by applying the Vichy stripes to the rudder...it would be better to have left that white- as i plan to use the kit decals for the rudder, and the stripes could well bleed through. The decals are very thin.




Andrew

hello, i say morane saulnier and thouht of the little monoplane form ww1,
the kit is coming along really nicely, did u freehand the camo, its nice!

Hi Jimmy, the camo was masked using bluetack- i don't trust my freehanding enough to do such tight schemes as this one.

Decal Warning: I did a test run using an un needed kit white decal and found that my suspicions are correct. They are VERY translucent. Also there is no decal for the rudder French Tri-colour, for some reason i thought there was! So out more masking tape to spray the rudder white, and at the same time to lay a white circle under each roundel location.

And that was when i made the second most dumbest mistake with a model i've ever made! (i'll tell you the dumbest mistake as well if promise not to laugh). I did the white circle for the left wing, then i went and did this on the right!




I have an excuse, sort of. I used a circle template (as below) and masked around all the other holes to stop overspray. One of the holes matched the size of the roundels for the placement of a white disc, just to stop the border of the underlying camo from showing through the white part of the roundels. Well the problem is with all the masking tape around the circle template you can't see exactly where you're placing it! I lined it up with wrong panel line. I then put it in the correct spot, which will have to be re done now anyway.

I gave myself an uppercut, don't worry. So now i have to re-do the outer right wing camo.
So no decals on tomorrow that's for sure.



Andrew

unlucky, shoudl be an easy fix tho!

when i used the blu tac method ona rmor i used to get l;oads of overspray and imperfrection, but this is smashin:D

Mistakes and omissions fixed, plus i went over the colours to soften and blend them a bit- as that seems to have been more normal for French camo at the time.

Now it really is ready for gloss coating and decals, but not today.




Andrew

Andrew:
The colors on this plane look great. I thought I was the only one who made painting errors Nice to know I am not alone.

Taylor

It's done. I'm not entirely happy with the canopy- hate vac formed clear parts! Too thin to get a good glue join and nevr easy to get to fit. Other than the canopy the AZ Model kit is pretty easy and fits quite well.







Andrew

Hi Andrew,

Very nice! You made a good job on the camouflage and the yellow/red stripes...

Do you have more pics?

Jean-Luc

Thanks Jean-Luc, that's all the pics so far. But i'll be taking more outside later this week (including underside)hopefully- my inside lighting is not the best for pics, but just wanted to show it finished.

Andrew

Hi Andrew

Lovely job! I'm looking forward to seeing the extra pics - this model deserves to be a Feature.

All the best

Rowan

It came out really nice. Congrats!
I second the opinions already brought up about the red and yellow striping. Well done.

Makes me want to start building the Finnish version in my stash... Not a chance though, too many kits on the bench at the moment. Perhaps I can get to it sometime next year.

Did you do anything with the wheels? They seem to sit okay. (at least on my sample the flat spots look like they're at a right angle)

Thanks for the comments.

Eetu: Regarding the wheels, they are the best compromise i could come up with using the kits wheels. Like you say the flat spots are at a 90 degree angle- whilst the aircraft had a large degree of camber. I sanded the flat spots as much as i could to angle the wheels, any more and they would just look like they were out of air completely. The angle could probably be a bit more to be totally accurate.
Really the wheels would be best replaced, but i hardly ever buy aftermarket stuff for my models. In this case it would have been much better for AZ to just cast the wheels round and let us make the flat spot.

Andrew

That's why I asked for extra photos...

Jean-Luc