With the front undercarriage
in position, I felt could fit most
of the final bits and pieces,
including all the remaining
etch, though I wasn’t going to
attach the doors at this point.
Italeri have the numbers
transposed for a couple of the door
rails; they’re called out as Part
11C for both the rear rails, but you
need to swap the bottom one with
14A at the front, then the locating
holes match the rail lengths.
Looking at the bits and pieces on
the lower fuselage and comparing
to pictures, I left off the forward
blade antenna, as this doesn’t
appear in any pictures of the French
H-21s I found. I also re-located
the pitot, as in all pictures it is
shown mounted slightly forward
of where Italeri would have it.
I spent a few minutes looking
for Part 7D, the whip antenna
mount on various sprues, before
realising that D is the clear sprue!
I masked and fitted the door
windows and the main cockpit
canopy, which fitted pretty well (the
Eduard mask is a real boon here),
but left off the other clear parts for
now to make painting easier. Ah
yes, paint. What colour shall we use?PAINTING
The instructions say “Gloss French
Blue” and references FS15180. On the
http://www.colorserver.net web page 15180
looks too light, but the drawings in
the instructions are a pretty good
match for Humbrol 14 French Blue.
However, the example in
Toulouse is clearly darker than
Humbrol 14 (very striking though,especially with the weathering
to the museum applied scheme).
I failed to find any contemporary
colour pictures of this aircraft in
use in Algeria and web searches
failed to give me any ideas at all,
so I dug through my blue paints
and decided on Xtracolor X163 Blue
Angels Blue F/A-18. I hoped with
some lightening and weathering
it would look OK, so off I went.
I started by painting the rotor
tips yellow and then masked them
before I sprayed the rotors black.
I then applied a first coat of
the blue to the main airframe. I
lightened it a little and applied a
second coat to the upper surfaces,
on the basis that any sun fading
would be more obvious there.
I now looked at the painted
model and decided I didn’t
like it; it was too light!
While the colour Italeri suggest
is even lighter than the one I used,
and would probably match the
roundel blue very well, I preferred
the darker blue as applied to the
one in Toulouse. So I went back and
looked at the pictures I had found
of the Algerian ops aircraft and
sure enough, there are black and
white photographs that show thatthe blue centre of the roundel is
much lighter than the airframe.
So on the basis that post-war
French Navy Corsairs were painted
the same as late war USN examples
(gloss sea blue), I dug out a tin
of Xtracolor X121 FS 15042 Gloss
Sea Blue and applied a coat of
this to darken the existing colour
to a point I felt I could live with.
And as a bonus this produced
more of the varied tones I was
looking for. So on to the decals!
Not so fast! While the paint job
was looking satisfactory it was also
very clean, and I was guessing that
in Algerian operations these aircraft
would have got quite dusty. So I
applied a mix of Flory Grime and
Light to one side of the model as atest of how well it would highlight
the rivets and panels and such.
The highlighting worked pretty
well, and quite a lot of the rest of
the airframe retained some of the
weathering as well. Whether it
was the paint or the underlying
plastic texture, I liked the effect,
so I decided to call it happy
accident and did the other side.
In preparation for the decals, and
to seal the weathering in against the
water that comes with decaling, I
applied a coat of Klear floor polish.
This also had the effect of toning
down the weathering on the panels- so another happy accident – and
I could move on to the decals.
I applied those on the underside
of the blades decals first, just to
26 • JUNE 2018 • SCALE AVIATION MODELLER INTERNATIONAL
022-27-FEAT-Banana-0618.indd 26 11/05/2018 15:50