with the cream base coat were given
their acrylic wood colour top coat.
At this stage the very slight
mould seam on all the parts started
to pop out. So, with a brand-new
scalpel I carefully scraped the seam
from the front and back of all the
many struts that this aircraft has
and reapplied the wood effect.
As well as the wood, each strut
has a multitude of fabric wraps
which need to be painted blue.
These fabric strengthenings are
represented as raised mouldings
and are quite pronounced and
overscale. I toyed with the idea
of sanding them back to make
them less pronounced; if this
was a 1/1 scale model the fabric
wraps would be raised up around
two centimetres from the strut.
In the end though I left themraised, as it made it easier to
paint the wrappings with Tamiya
Medium Blue XF-18, which was
a good match for the French
horizon blue that the wrappings,
metal fittings, and rigging were
originally painted on the Caudron.
With the wooden areas
completed my attention turned
to the wings. As this aircraft
features a clear doped finish and
the wings are very much a focal
point of the kit, I wanted to try
and replicate the shadow effect of
the wing ribs beneath the fabric.
To achieve this, I spent
absolutely ages masking off the ribs
on the top wing before spraying
them a dark brown colour and
then removing the masks. The ribs
looked ok but it seemed a lot of
effort to go to, so for the remainingwing ribs I decided to experiment
a bit and used a brown watercolour
pencil to draw over the ribs.
The wings then received a light
spray of Tamiya Buff XF-57. Once
the Tamiya paint had dried it proved
impossible to tell which ribs had
been painted after hours of masking
and which had been done with the
pencil in a couple of minutes.
The fuselage and engine nacelles
were assembled next. The fuselage
and cockpit went together very
easily and quickly. The various
details were picked out with the
correct colours, as called out in
the instructions, before they were
brought together. I chose not to
use the supplied acetate sheetfor the observer’s floor window,
preferring to use Micro Kristal
Klear to glaze it after assembly.
The cockpit and engine nacelle
assemblies cleverly have the cabane
and interplane struts moulded
integrally with them, which makes
alignment a lot easier. But one
aspect of this kit I did struggle
with was the photo-etch; there is
an awful lot of it and it has been
produced in steel, not brass. Steel is
a lot harder to work with, because
when you bend it, it can become
brittle and snap. Also, steel is much
harder to bend into a curve than
brass, as it tends to want to spring
back to its original shape, and it is
for this reason that my Caudron“IT IS SURPRISINGLY EASY TO
ASSEMBLE DESPITE IT BEING A MULTI-
BAY BIPLANE WITH TAIL BOOMS”
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