I masked off the windscreen, noticing for the first time that Airfix have forgotten to include a rear view mirror in the kit. Oh well, more scratch-building I suppose. I installed the windscreen and attended to a few lingering pinholes and gaps before giving the whole thing a coat of Halford’s primer. Once everything seemed to be ok, it was on with the colours, first off, XF-21 Sky from Tamiya on the underside, the spinner, the gear covers and the arrester hook, not forgetting the rear fuselage band.
Once this was all dry and masked off, it was time for the top colours. I used the closest thing I could find to the “Dark Slate Grey” mentioned in the instructions, which happened to be RLM02 in the form of Tamiya XF-22
…and once that was on, the production of Blu-Tak sausages started
Once the topside was masked to represent the current, somewhat simplified, camouflage scheme of the SC example…
…I filled in the gaps with Extra Dark Sea Grey, courtesy of Gunze H333
I masked off the canopy in two stages, as I’m not a fan of cutting masking tape in situ, so I first masked off the horizontal frames of the canopy and sprayed them. Then I unmasked, masked off the vertical frames and sprayed them – much quicker than trying to make twelve individual window panel masks to fit!