1/72 Hasegawa Mosquito (FINISHED!)

[36feet10inches]

In between tinkering with the wings I've been pondering how to do the dreaded stripes on the prop spinners. This is what I came up with. I'm sure it must have been done this way before?

1) prime and spray white acrylic:

2) use narrow bits of Tamiya tape of same length to make a "bridge" between the back of the spinner and where the stripe needs to be:

3) using the end of the "bridge" as a guide, use a 1mm wide strip of tape to mask the stripe. Using straight tape got me nowhere, I experimented with using lots of bits of straight tape end to end but eventually used a curved strip. The amount of curve was pure guesswork and I cut it freehand, it just made it easier to cope with it going round the curve of the spinner. It was fairly easy to smoosh it around with my thumbnail until it looked something like a circle, then I could burnish it down.

4) remove "bridge"

5) another squirt of white to seal the edge of the tape:

6) couple of layers of roundel blue:

7) after drying, remove mask:

Stripes!

It's not 100% perfect close up like this but to the naked eye at 1/72 looks decent. Fairly pleased with this outcome. Should look better with a bit of satin varnish on it.

 

[36feet10inches]

And I thought I'd better get the wings on without further ado. The fit isn't quite the dream I thought it was, I mean it can be totally flush on the top side if I hoist the wings upwards and have the plane waving its arms in the air but then there's a gap on the underside, and after all it's a Mosquito, not a Corsair. Bit of filler will do it. I've blanked out those aft pilot lights.

 

[Wurger]

 

[rochie]

Very nicely done

 

[Crimea_River]

Good work on those tricky spinners.

 

[Wayne Little]

Agreed, Well done ...!

 

[Gnomey]

Nice work so far!

 

[36feet10inches]

Well, after all that talk of the brilliant wing fit I've been filling and sanding like a champion. At one point I was contemplating major surgery because one wingtip was a full quarter inch higher then the other and I thought I'd put the wings on wrong, then I realised one of the landing gears had become unstuck so it was sitting low on one side . Had to flood it with poly cement to sort it, but it's well out of the way. It's starting to look like a plane now though. The wings are much improved. Probably two or three days away from decals, most of which will be drying time. Snapped the pitot tube off.

 

[Wurger]

 

[Gnomey]

Good work so far!

 

[36feet10inches]

Decals are on...

The roundels etc are from a Freightdog Models sheet ("Brits at Sea") and weren't the easiest to work with. The centre red circles of the roundels are printed separately (never been able to work out why they do this - something to do with printing registers?) and for some reason the red seems particularly delicate, I turned a bunch of them to mush and had to "steal" from another airframe represented on the sheet - Seafire PR 497 is not to be. This annoys me. I was actually in last chance saloon with the starboard upper roundel and managed to knacker that too, took a chunk out of it with the tip of my brush that I managed to fill with a sliver extracted from elsewhere on the sheet. You have to look really closely to see it. The decals stuck quite readily and didn't lend themselves to being shoved into place with a brush very easily.

The stencils came off the Hasegawa sheet out the box and were great. For some reason the Freightdog sheet has a pair of those red box "keep off" panels that are both smaller than the kit examples and don't have the words "keep off", I went with the originals as I couldn't see why they'd be different and they look better.

In this light it looks weirdly like a desert camo scheme... bit of drying time before a second coat of Klear and then on to trying out a wash!

 

[Wurger]

 

[Night Fighter Nut]

I like it. Coming along nicely.

 

[Crimea_River]

Too bad about the decal challenges but looks like you mastered them in he end. Could be an improper white balance setting on your camera or phone.

 

[Airframes]

Andy is probably right. The white in the roundels is reproducing OK, so could very well be the green cutting mat confusing the camera sensor - I've had that happen before, particularly under incandescent light sources.

 

[36feet10inches]

The lightbulbs in that part of the house are old-fashioned tungsten filament, the only bit I haven't yet switched to LED, and cast a yellowish light, probably explains it, along with the green mat.

 

[Airframes]

Yep. In the "old days", an 80B blue filter would be used to balance the light.

 

[36feet10inches]

My first forays into the way of the wash aren't proving very successful. Almost all the panel lines are very shallow and no matter what I do I just clean the wash right out. I've tried all sorts, leaving it on longer, varying amount of thinner in kitchen towel/cotton bud I'm using to remove the excess, you name it. Not sure where I'm going wrong. I'm after "subtle", not "absent".

 

[Crimea_River]

Rather than wiping, maybe try blotting the wash with the pointy end of a tightly twisted facial tissue dabbed into one end of the recess.

 

[36feet10inches]

Rather than get too hung up on the panel lines first time out with the wash (as a balsa bird the Mozzie was a fairly smooth plane in any case) I'm settling for the movey bits (control surfaces?), bit of wash followed by the lightest stroke of a bit of kitchen towel with just the tiniest hint of thinner moistureI'm conscious that all this mucking about means handling the model a lot and inevitably something will give - I've had to do a running repair on a decal and one of the mudguards has fallen off. That said, there's now a vaguely appealing muckiness to the model.