**** DONE: 1/48 Fiat G.55S Torpedo Fighter - Mediterranean Theater of Operations

Agreed

Ok... time for paint! First I make sure the surfaces are nice and clean. I like to don a rubber glove on my left hand to help prevent fingerprints.



The panel lines are pre-shaded in black, top and bottom...



To give the paint job a little more depth, I'm going to try something different. Some random pre-shading in brown. I'm using a highly-thinned paint and low air pressure to get a fine mottle in the mid panel areas.



The exhaust trail and bottom center of the fuselage is darkened with a black-brown mixture.


I've decided to go with an RLM 74/75/76 scheme. The light blue (76) is a mix of Tamiya of paints. I've been gravitating toward heavily thinned paints on my paint jobs so that I can modulate the effects of the pre-shading a little better. It takes more time but it's worth the effort and you are not likely to cross that vague line between too much pre-shading and "oops, where did the pre-shading go???".


It's a bit hard to see in the picture but the brown did give a little bit of underlying "texture" to the 76.



I'm going to give the 76 a few hours to dry but before I break for lunch, I give the torpedo a coat of black in preparation of the metalized Alclad finish.


After lunch, I apply the top coat of lighter gray (75). Using the spare wing as a testbed, I did another run of tests and have decided to do dark mottling on the lighter gray instead of the other way around (light spots on a dark background). I leave the preshading layer a little more exposed on top since a mottle finish will tend to mask the preshading. I even do a little post-shading on some panel lines before the mottle.




Ok... time for the mottle! The spinner is a nice, small area to start and test the airbrush/paint/air-pressure combination. I've found that I can do a finer line with my Paasche V than my Iwata HP+C so I switch airbrushes.


I start on the port wing and work inward toward the fuselage. I try not rush and make sure that I have good angles and reach on each stroke of the airbrush, taking special care when I get to hard to reach areas like the wing root.





It's a fairly time consuming process to the get the mottle down, especially considering it's only a single color in the cup. I have to pay special attention to the thinner/paint ratio as I shoot as the thinner (90% iso alcohol) tends to evaporate over a period of time. If the paint starts to spit, I stop, clean the airbrush and re-check my paint consistency before going on.


There are some inevitable areas of overspray but as the mottle pattern progresses, those mistakes get harder and harder to see. After completion, I will check everything again and if necessary, remove the overspray using the lighter gray.


It takes a few hours but I finally finish the camo work.



The transition between the mottle and the light blue on the bottom was a little awkward... I just had to fade it as best as I could. I may do another fade coat of light blue just to clean it up.


Tack the spinner on to have an overall look at her... pretty wild eh?



Looks ok but I'm a bit nervous of the canopy situation. I should be getting 1 (hopefully 2) canopy candidates by next week. Depending on fit, I may have to do some touch up work on the camo.

That is some spiffy looking camouflage John.

Geo

Damn that looks good. I'm surprised to hear that you can get a finer line with the Paasche. I have a Paasche VL with the 3 different tips and the whole reason I bough the Iwata was to get a thinner line.

Thanks Andy... could be that I know my Paasche better than the Iwata. Comparing the two, the Iwata is more robust, easier to clean, shoots a smoother finish and is more consistent. Except when shooting thinner mixes of paint. I don't know what I'm doing wrong but my HP+C seems to get really finicky when I want to shoot fine lines. It either spits on me (paint too thick) at which I start mixing some thinner into the cup. I'll get a few passes in at the correct consistency but then the paint starts to get watery.

My Paasche V shoots crooked (my main complaint) even though I've replaced the tip and needle multiple times but I can get a VERY fine line out of it and I don't have as much trouble with the paint/thinner ratios.

The difference is that because the Paasche is a syphon feed, you can get away with mixing in the cup whereas mixing in the cup of a gravity feed like the Iwata will always result in the bit of paint already loaded into the brush not being mixed. Havng said that, I'm guilty of dong the same but I do give the brisha long snort onto a piece of paper to get the thinner mix loaded before spraying on the model.

Both are good brushes and I must admit that I have not tried fine lines in my Paasche using Tamiya paints as I've relegated it to spraying larger masked areas. Maybe I'll give it a try on my next mottling job.

Fantastic work John!

John, your camouflage is for sure the best I have ever seen, specially considering that you are working on a 1/48 model!!
Congratulation!!!
Alberto

fantastic paint job, very well done

Yeah, that looks awesome John, great job!

Great job on the camo!

Agree with all.

With all here, so good job

Done real good John!

Thanks everyone! I'm happy with the way the mottled scheme turned out although it was kind of driving me batty while doing it. The practice runs on the wing were a definite help and its good to have patience when painting a scheme like this. When I got cross-eyed, I shut off the airbrush compressor, walked away and came back later with fresh eyes. Thus, the mottling job took three separate sessions to complete.

Some progress to report on my Silurante. The canopy issue has been resolved with the arrival of a vacuformed canopy from Falcon that I pulled from EBay. My other two options have not materialized as of yet (no word on from the retailer or manufacturer and the SMER canopy from a gracious member has not arrived) but as things go, I wouldn't be surprised if those showed up now that I've moved on.

The Falcon canopy for the G.55 is contained within a set of twenty or so canopies of various Russian and Italian fighter planes. Here is the product list...

Fiat G.50 (Hasegawa), IAR 80 (LTD), La-57 (Hobbycraft), I-16 type 10 (Hobbycraft), Yak-18 (Accurate Min), Fiat G.50 standard (Hasegawa), LAGG-3 early (LTD), I-16 type 5 (Hobbycraft), I-16 standard (Hobbycraft), Yak-7/7V early (ICM), Fiat G.55 (Classic Air Frames), LAGG-3 late (LTD), Yak-9 (ICM), Yak-1 (Accurate Min), Yak7/7V late (ICM)

If anyone is need of a replacement canopy from the above list, please let me know! I doubt that I will be making use of most (if not all) of these things.

This is my first experience with vacuformed plastic so I approached it VERY CAREFULLY. First I cut the G.55 canopy from the rest of the sheet. It was located in a corner of the sheet so I used a pair of sharp scissors.



Using some good advice from more experienced members here, I armed myself with a sharp blade (new X-Acto blade) and used a chunk of Silly Putty to serve as a support base for cutting.



The recommended procedure for removing vac canopies from their sheet is to score the sheet with your blade. The plastic here is quite thin (and flexible) so you don't need much force on the blade. Using radial cuts from the canopy to the outer edge of the surrounding sheet, I divided the work into sections. Not wanting to mess things up, I was quite conservative with my cuts and left a bit of excess to be trimmed later.




After a while, I was able to make a complete circuit around the canopy. This is the canopy cut fresh from the sheet. It's hard to see but there is a definite ridge of excess material around the edges of the canopy that has to be removed.



The instructions state that the G.55 canopy was intended for the Classic Airframes kit so the fit to this Flying Machines model was not guaranteed. A quick check shows that the fit looks pretty good... dimensions look just about right. I'm sure with some trimming, it will fit quite well. Whew....



Trimming the excess took much longer than anticipated. The flexibility of the acetate made sanding and filing difficult and time consuming. Over time, as I became more familiar with the material, I resorted to shaving the excess using an X-Acto blade. This proved to be a more effective way to remove the excess. Once the excess was removed, I used sandpaper to smooth the edges.



Checking the fit after canopy is cleaned up.



The canopy was masked using a combination of Scotch tape cut along the frame lines (using Dymo tape as a guide) and small pieces of Tamiya tape.



Canopy masked and painted... I can move on to decaling



This kit has very minimal decaling to do. Not much stenciling to speak of. I restricted my gloss coat to the general areas where decals were to be applied.

The kit decals are nice and thin and behave well under the MicroSet/MicroSol system.



I am inclined to believe that the upper wing fascias were black with a clear background but the decal set provided by Flying Machines only supplies black and white fascias. So I am going to wait a couple of days for some possible replacements to arrive but will resort to the black and white if I get overly impatient.

Next is weathering!

Look's sweeet John

Great work John, and congratulations on your first successful vac-formed canopy !
It's sometimes very tricky to mask vac-formed canopies, due to their nature, so a possible alternative is to use coloured or painted decal strip or, a method i find easier and more realistic, use painted 'Sellotape' (clear parcel tape, such as 3M Scotch tape).
Lightly attach a length of tape to a sheet of glass (I use a glass drinks coaster), then paint the interior colour first. When this is fully dry, paint the exterior colour.
When dry, cut the required sizes of strips for the frames, and attach to the canopy, gently burnishing into place once properly attached. If desired, the tape strips can be sealed in place with a clear coat, or 'Future', and a suitable clear finish coat applied (to the frames) with a fine brush.

Airframes said:

Great work John, and congratulations on your first successful vac-formed canopy !
It's sometimes very tricky to mask vac-formed canopies, due to their nature, so a possible alternative is to use coloured or painted decal strip or, a method i find easier and more realistic, use painted 'Sellotape' (clear parcel tape, such as 3M Scotch tape).
Lightly attach a length of tape to a sheet of glass (I use a glass drinks coaster), then paint the interior colour first. When this is fully dry, paint the exterior colour.
When dry, cut the required sizes of strips for the frames, and attach to the canopy, gently burnishing into place once properly attached. If desired, the tape strips can be sealed in place with a clear coat, or 'Future', and a suitable clear finish coat applied (to the frames) with a fine brush.

Click to expand...

Glad to get this first one under my belt without any major mishaps! The instructions DID make mention of decal strips to form the canopy frames but I assumed I would be masking and painting mine. Since the definition of the canopy frames is much softer on vac canopies, I could see how it might be difficult to mask them. Mine were fairly simple (straight and at right angles for the most part) so I didn't consider any alternatives but I'll keep the tape/decal option in mind for the future. I used Dymo tape as a guide to cut the straight frames and that worked fairly well.