hi all! its been a while since i posted anything up here, however due to a DIY "oopsie" with a small power saw (nothing actually hacked off though!)and being off work i have had quite a bit of modelling time.
which brings me to this, i originally bought this kit from ebay but it arrived with a damaged canopy, i made a couple of attempts to fix it, made it worse! then decided to buy another magister kit, and make a vac copy of the canopy.
all very well, but while trying to make a copy of the good one i cracked it in just the same way as the first one!
fast forward a couple of years and i see that pavla are releasing a resin cockpit set that includes a vac canopy, a set of seats, and the canopy on its own. pavla had sent some review copies to aeroscale, that rowan (merlin) was then kind enough to pass on to me for review,and i did an in box review here-
http://aeroscale.kitmaker.net/review/4921
now its time to put this kit together, and this thread will also form the basis of a build review too,so heres what i'm starting with-

the boxes, and in the top corner of this pic are the pavla seats

a better view of the same seats.

Hi Phil
Really looking forward to this build. I see one of these quite regularly parked at Toulouse Airport. Such a attractive aircraft. Good luck with the build.
tim

they are nice aircraft tim! i saw one up close at an airshow some years ago, which is probably what put the idea in my head to pick up a couple of these kits!
the seats a little further on-

when i finished painting them, i gave them a wash with some pro modeller black, to try to lose the "newness" of the seat, especially the blue harness straps that i painted with humbrol 47 light blue, which seemed to be a good match to cockpit pics i have, but being a gloss colour needed to be matted down, and the really fine detailing of the buckles was crying out to be highlighted.

the dashboards. all i did to these was a coat of matt black, then when that dried i used a small peice of fuse wire to put blobs of ordinary white PVA glue into the dials to represent glass. quick, easy, and i think very effective!


the completed cockpit tub. because the all black colour needs something to stop it looking like i just sloshed it out with matt black, i picked out the control stick, throttle lever and some random panels with some satin varnish to put some contrast in there. the entire tub fits into the fusalage quite easily with a little fettling, and you will have to remove the front and rear coamings, the rear because its part of the vac formed canopy, and the front to get the dashboard with its instrument backs in, as shown here-

onwards and upwards!

these blanking/splitter plates will have to be sanded flush with the sides, otherwise they hit the replacement cockpit tub and prevent the fusalage from closing together
.........all together now, dryfit check, dryfit check, dryfit check,

naughty airfix! the instructions here show the left hand splitter plate being put on the exhaust nozzle, instead of the intake!

i just assumed this kit would tailsit so i crammed the nose with lead, cut from a bit of scrap lead sheet i keep around just for this use. after this pic was taken and when i'd put the cockpit tub in, there was some more room underneath that i put another peice of lead into.
this kit will definitely NOT tailsit!

just to work out where its centre of gravity is, i taped the fusalage halves together, and just balanced it on a nail, it is enough to show that it stays nose down, with the nail way forward of where the main undercarridge will be.

before i put the canopy on, i had to fill around the rear deck, with its radio gear and assorted cables and pipes, in doing this i lost some of the detail of the moulded on cables, so i decided to drill a small hole through the bulkhead and place some fusewire through to bring it back, as this will be quite visable through the big canopy.

Hi Phil
Looking very, very good. It's odd seeing a jet without ejector seats. I like the way the instrument on go through the pilots instrument panel. The fuse wire makes a huge difference to the feel of the whole thing.
keep up the excellent work.
tim

Testing the centre of gravity before a model is finished is considered bad form and not gentlemanlike. Using a nail for that purpose is especially bad !

Do you have any ideas what paint scheme you will go for? I would be tempted to do an Israeli one...

A bit of Fouga Magister inspiration from Youtube!



Magnus

surely everyone tests for tailsitting-ness? plus i don't build many of these pesky new fangled tricycle undercarridged jets, so i wanted to make sure it would'nt show me up (and its going to be the basis for a review article!)
as for colour scheme i'm going to be spectacularly original and build it as a patrouille de france machine, but the other magister kit i have will most likely be built in the
luftwaffe colour scheme.

so i have this brilliant idea.....
i decided to paint the red white and blue wings and tail first, mask them, then paint the rest of the model.
i first sprayed a band of white, because the white band is actually provided as a decal, but i didn't quite trust it to cover a red/blue wing underneath.

which was just as well, because the decal from this kit was incrdibly thin, and curled up pretty drastically

i lost this one, but luckily i have another magister kit,so i was able to replace the curled up decal with one from the other kit, this other decal sheet seemed to be a little more thick and behaved itself
HOWEVER.....
when i masked the white stripes (good name for a band!) and sprayed the red and blue i had bleed under onto the white by the red, then the decals got damaged when the masking tape pulled bits off here and there-


not a major disaster, just means i need to re-mask and spray the wings until i've got straight well defined edges.

A good idea to prevent this is to spray a coat of clear on AFTER masking and BEFORE the second colour. This will prevent the paint from bleeding under the tape. A quick swipe with the tip of your blade along the length of the tape once the paint is dry and you should have a nice clean edge.

Hope this helps. Otherwise, your build here is looking great !!

Cheers, Damian

and she's finished! actually its been finished for a while, its just that with one thing and another in "the real world" ive been a bit busy in other areas of my life.
once i got the decal issue sorted out there was'nt really a lot left to do, just put on the wheels and some little aerials/probes and this kits finished.
looks great with the pavla set and vac canopy to see it through, and is a nice eye catcher of a kit on the display shelf.
thanks go to merlin for sending me the stuff, and pavla for making it which,
A.allowed me to build this kit
and,
B. makes what is a nice kit to start with even better!