Painting walkways, jack-lines and installing flaps

Nice to have you back in my blog.

This time I will show you how I painted the walkways on the wings and the jack-lines below the wings.

The final part of the post will deal with the installation of the flaps.

Since the walkways on top of the wing are very long and the decals supplied by HK are too short I decided to paint them on.

So once again a masking session started:

right wing. As you can see I also sprayed the red quarter surrounding the dinghy-panel.

and left wing.

After this I moved over to the lower wings. There I masked the lines for jacking of the aircraft. For this I used the kit-decals as a template.

This is how it looks like finished:

left wing underside. The landing-lights which can be seen in the picture were painted with a Molotow 1mm chrome-pencil. Very easy and very effective!

right wing. Since the line next to the inner nacelle exceeds to the flap I fixed it with Tamiya-Tape.

After this I moved over to the tailplane:

right underside

and left underside

Finally I had to mask the red lines under the forward and aft fuselage:

forward fuselage

and aft fuselage.

Then followed the airbrushing with Gunze Flat Black (H12) and Gunze Brown (H7), same color as used for the center of the roundels and the a/c-code:

The finishing step was the removing of the masks. Here are some pics of the result:

tailplanes

forward fuselage

rear fuselage

left wing underside

right wing underside

right wing top

left wing top. Everything went fine with nothing to correct.

Final topic of today’s post is the installation of the flaps to the wings.

I didn’t expect it to be a problem and therefore finished painting of all components. This proved to be not the best idea since the fit - which I only roughly tested before - was not that good.

I had to rework the part of the inner flaps

sliding into the nacelle on both sides. And

I had to use superglue and accelerator to

glue the flaps to the wing to achieve a satisfying fit.

You also have to take care that the levers of the retraction-mechanism point to the fuselage. This cannot be seen in the instructions! Typical for this kit...😔

It is also not useful to cement the levers to the flaps and then glue the assembly to the wing as suggested by the instructions. This will lead to an alignment problem because you have to glue the flap to the wing and also the retraction-mechanism to

the inner side of the wing.

So I chose another way: First I glued the flap to the wing. This has the advantage that there are no levers in the way when using superglue and accelerator.

The assembly of the retraction-mechanism is a little bit fiddly then, but it works.

Using accelerator leads to a white layer on the glue. This can be reduced by brushing Future Floor Polish over them.

But finally I had to remove the remaining traces by airbrushing Interior Green and RAF Night in the affected places.

This is how the assembled flaps came out:

left wing

right wing

right wing again

and finally left wing.

With these pictures I close my post of today.

This is the status of my build as of today. The time to the next update will take a little longer because I have a family and therefore mainly build the model in nightshifts and partly on the weekends.

The next post will deal with the detailing of the main landing gear, the weathering of the wheels and a test-procedure regarding applying the glosscote for the stencils.

Have a nice and enjoyable weekend!