Canopy
The large canopy is going to be sprayed inside and out and so you can see it masked up here ahead of applying the Tamiya NATO Black – a great dark grey for simulating scale black. You may be able to see that the canopy has the familiar thin mould seam line down the middle. Again, using the buffers and sanders this is quickly removed and the canopy polished using MER car polish (see TB for how to do all this including HD video demos – here). Fine wear and tear marks are made using an ordinary pencil.
Propeller
The huge propeller is sprayed NATO Black with the prop tips Tamiya Flat Yellow (XF-3) – applying the yellow over black tones down the yellow nicely so that it’s not too bright. Quite often I use Tamiya XF-4 Yellow Green for the tips to create nicely worn tips but as I’ve used that a lot elsewhere I want to see a different tone/shade here to provide contrast. Some Johnson’s Klear (Future) is hand-brushed on and after a couple of hours the decals added with flat varnish after that (Alclad2 Flat Kote). Final weathering with a graphite pencil again, not over-the-top but just enough to create a realistic look. The nice red spinner is painted Xtracolor X-31 Post Office Red and weathered in the same way.
