Greetings! I just
finished this build today - 10082005. It wasn't intended for Singapore's
National Day, on the 9th of August, but rather as a present for a birthday on
the 10th of August. I had been planning this kit for about half a year now, and
bought the Italeri kit during Christmas Sale. I also purchased the Flightpath
Detail Set, and Flightpath T56-A-15 Engine Units in Resin. I used photos from
MINDEF (122 Sqn helped a lot in the tsunami relief efforts, and they have plenty
of photos to show it), the Verlinden Lock On book, and also the RSAF 25th
Anniversary book called: " ". Decals was always going to
be a problem, until I found out that Scalenutz was planning to release a set for
RSAF C-130s in 1/72 scale around summer 2005 (Of course, in typical Singaporean
style, that just means "the near future, no exact date"). I emailed Y
C Ha at Scalenutz many many many times (I do have to thank him for his
patience), and finally managed to get him to agree to thermal print a set of
markings for me, for $50 SGD. This set had markings for 2 planes - except on one
goof - he included twice as many Merlion heads (the national insignia) and only
one set of the numbers "30".. so in reality I can only build one
plane. Decals took me about 3 months from the first email to final collection. I
started the build on the 1st of July, so time taken was 40 days, with last 10
days modelling at maybe 8 hours a day
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Using the Flightpath detail set
and the verlinden book, I tried to spruce up the cockpit as much as I could,
but losing the throttles to the carpet monster god. I realised that it would
be extremely difficult to look in from the windows in this scale, so I
concentrated my efforts on the ramp and the cargo hold instead. However, one
look at the photos in the Verlinden book told me that I would not be able to
reach that level of detail in 40 days (unless maybe, if I was John Vojtech who
was the guy at the
IPMS Nats 2005 who built that AC-130...). I tellya, the Flightpath photo-etched set
is one bugger to use, as not all the words (ie instructions) are illustrated.
Hey you guys at flightpath: A picture paints a thousand words! Assembling the
flaps was a headache, as there were so many pieces to put together on each
side...
Painting was done with standard
SEA scheme colours, masked using blu-tack snakes. RSAF C-130s have the unique
feature of having WRAPAROUND camo - no light grey on the undersides. I could
not find any photos that gave me more than 5% (in total) of the underside camo..
I gather the underside isn't a popular shot to take for photographers eh?
Attempts at getting photos from contacts were also futile, nowadays it's
illegal to bring phones with cameras inside, much less a digicam (Ah, those
good ol pre-911 days). To give myself a reference when I painted, I
photo-copied the Verlinden scale drawings in 1/144, and started to draw on
them, piecing the tens of photos I found over the net. This resulted in a
rather comprehensive camo scheme, except for a few parts. As for the
underside, I simply used my imagination.. No one's gonna look at my
model's underside either! You can see my hand drawn camo scheme layout in one
of the pictures
As I built the cargo hold, I also
realised that the innards were simply too sparse. I built 2 boxes to fit
inside, wrapped them with wrapping paper that had "Happy Birthday"
on it, and glued it insdie to hide the emptiness. I guess it also looks like
the plane's delivering birthday presents... As for the Flightpath detail set,
the main attraction is the cargo ramp piece - when masked off and painted
(took me an hour to mask), it looks very nice indeed... The set, as the
flightpath guys say, really isn't for amateurs.. I used up quite a few x-acto
blades as they got blunt on the brass faster.
I also had to chop and fill the
engine mountings on the wings in order to fit the resin T56-A-15 units, this I
didn't do too well, and some areas are still rather.. edgy.
I also restored panel lines by
masking off a thin line and filling the gap with putty, then sanding it down
to shape. It works quite well, as I realise I can't tell the difference after
a few coats of paint.
The decals gave me a shock when
I got them - they were just the markings, no stencils (RSAF planes have a lot
of unique stencils). Ah well, at least I got my 730 markings, I thought. I
tried to use as much stencils from the kit decals, but I'm still missing a
lot. The display base cost me about 5USD, a photo frame from Ikea, painted
using any spare grays I had, dirtied with all sorts of mumbo-jumbo. The lines
were masked after drawing them out in pencil (and a compass, of course),
yellow sprayed and weathered. The squadron patch, I got from a friend who used
SAF credits to buy it (ie... free).
The HF antennas are beading wire,
sprayed black. I stretched it a little to make it just that little bit
thinner. Antennas and all, from the Flightpath set. Here's the weird part: in
some photos, a plane would have the railing antennae, in some photos it
wouldn't, so I was at quite a loss as to which ones to put. In the end I put
those that made the plane look nice.
When I presented the present (doh),
it got a few WoWs and dropped jaws. I hope you enjoy it too
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Finally, I can get back to
building 1/48 Jets!
David
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