All other photos © 2005 John Gosselin
Decals:
Extras:
General:
This kit is Hobbycraft's second 1/48 Arrow kit. It's a retooled and corrected kit, rectifying a lot of what made their old kit a real POS. The new kit features:
Assembly:
Step one with this kit, as with any airplane kit, was with the cockpit. The kit's cockpit consists of a very simplistic 4-piece ejection seat and a few consoles and panels on which you are to place decals to represent all the controls. Also, if assembled as per the kit's instructions, the cockpit sits too far forward of where it should be in relation to the canopy.
Because of this, I decided to use the existing kit cockpit as a base, and scratchbuild the details onto it. I used a lot of 0.005" styrene sheet, various diameters of styrene rod cut into slices to represent gauges, and various rod, stretched sprue and wire for switches. I made my own cockpit floor from styrene sheet and assembled the cockpit correctly so it would look right with the canopy components in place.
Once the bulk of the detail work was finished, I painted everything. The main cockpit colour in the Arrow is a light gray. Judging from these photos, I decided to paint my cockpit RLM 76 Lichtblau, while the various consoles themselves would be MM Interior Black and/or Flat Black. I also substituted Aeroclub ejection seats for the kit seats at this point. I finished each component with sludge washes of gray on the cockpit and brown and gray for the seats.
The nest step before being able to close the nose was the nose gear well. The kit has some very simplistic detail, so I decided to add my own details. I studied photos, and they showed a lot of wiring and a bit of structural detail, so I decided to model the structural detail now and add the wiring and such later on. I added some ribs to the bottom of the cockpit floor, which also acted as the ceiling of the gear well, as well as to the side walls of the well. I also decided to paint the well chromate yellow because in black and white photos, the well appears to be a darker shade than the surrounding white of the fuselage, signifying that it is a colour other than white, and since a good portion of the Arrow's interior components are painted yellow (again, from pictures), I took a small liberty and painted it yellow. I followed that up with a quick sludge wash of gray with a bit of brown.
With that, I closed up the fuselage and began work on the nose gear itself. The kit gear on its own was a somewhat decent representation; definitely much better than the old kit's nose gear. Wanting to make my kit as accurate as I could, however, I knew I could do more. Again, I added my own styrene details to the kit's parts as a base. In the end, I'm quite pleased with what I came up with, which hold up well compared to the photos.
Next update will have shots of the main gear wells and a minor snag I encountered.
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