I've alway had a passion for the almighty Avro Lancaster and B-17 Flying Fortress as they are both beautiful and the best heavy bombers of their time. Having decided to build both of them in 1/72 scale, my first choice was obviously the Lancaster as its a far more superior aircraft than the B-17! It's a pity though, that out of the 7,000 or so built throughout its history, only 2 are currently flight capable.
Although I bought this kit about a couple of weeks ago, I have been building it on and off as it's definitely not a weekend project where I can simply build, paint and finish a model in about 2 or 3 days. This kit has a lot of parts and quite a bit of painting needs to be done before the basic build is complete. By far it's an excellent kit as the quality is superb.
I did a little bit of research on which kit to purchase and decided on this particular model by Airfix as it was relatively cheap compared to other models and the release date was fairly recent. The only one "flaw" of this model is that it comes with the Hercules radial engine instead of the Merlin engine which most people are accustomed to. The kit doesn't come with any bombs but as I was planning to build the kit with the bomb bay doors closed, it doesn't really matter.
Here are some photos of my build progress :
The construction of the cockpit area with all the parts and interior walls painted. The instrument panel decal is a bit oversized. I just trimmed off the top to match the panel size.
A little bit of weathering done as well. I love the radio and map decals!
Basic build completed.
Next is the much dreaded masking procedure. I think it took me about 5-6 hours to complete all the masking and my passion for building heavy bombers came down a notch because of this.
Base coat of dark earth painted after preshading. Normally, I would paint the underside first then the topside but since the Lancaster was a night bomber and most of its fuselage was black, it would be easier to paint the lighter colors first.
I had the engines painted prior to attaching them to the cowls and masked off the openings with cardboards cut in circular shapes.
Preparing the camouflage mask. I scanned the decal/painting guide which comes with the kit, enlarged the image in Photoshop to match the wingspan then cut up the wings, fuselage and tail section so that it would fit into 2 sheets of A4 size paper for printing.
Masking tape applied and ready for another round of painting.
Dark green color applied. The wingspan of this 1/72 scale Lancaster is 43cm. Not only is it big, it takes up a lot of paint as well!
Camouflage completed. Next would be painting the underside of the fuselage, adding the rudders, undercarriage, turrets, decals and finally weathering.
To be continued...
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