Fuselage roundels and Guy Gibson Markings

Welcome back to my blog. As stated in the last post this time I will describe how I painted the roundels on the fuselage and applied the markings of Guy Gibsons personal aircraft.

This is how the final result looks like:

To achieve this result I used the masks from the TopNotch set which includes

all markings for Guy Gibsons aircraft.

When you use these masks you have to keep in mind that they are made from thin vinyl and not from Kabuki-tape. This means that you have to pay special attention to sharp corners because the vinyl doesn‘t fit very well there. This is especially a problem when applying them over the longerons which run along the fuselage on the complete length of the bomb-bay.

As you can see in the pictures above the roundels and the letters extend over this longeron.

I started with the fixation of the outer masks of the roundels to the fuselage. The relative position to the fuselage windows is a good reference as is the demarcation line between the upper and lower camouflage colors. The exact position can be taken out of original photos of Dambuster aircraft you can find in the internet and in my preferred Dambuster book already quoted very often:

First I marked the roundels on the carrier because it is easier then to align them during the painting process:

Then I applied the outer masks to the correct position on the fuselage:

Left side

Right side

As you can see in the photos I used Tamiya tape for the part of the mask crossing the longeron.

Next step was to prepare the surface for the painting process. Therefore the surface was painted white and then the

preshading was applied:

over this the white and the yellow was painted:

Next was to apply all masks to the outer mask and align them. Then you start painting from the inside to the outside. This prevents you from the necessity to realign masks during the process.

So the inner mask was removed and the red dot including postshading with a lightened red was applied. After drying the mask was reapplied and the mask for the blue removed. Then the blue and lightened blue was sprayed:

After I removed all masks I only found a little overspray which could be touched up with a microbrush. This is how the roundels came out:

Left side

Right side

I then moved over to the application of the markings.

First thing was to determine the correct distance between the letters and the letters and roundels. This was taken out of pictures and drawings and translated to 32nd scale and resulted in 4 mm distance.

Then I cut the masks to have the possibility to apply all at once to the fuselage:

I also marked some attachment points on the fuselage with a pencil to have some guidance.

This is how it looked like after several attempts of applying and reapplying:

Left side

Right side

As you can see I also used Tamiya tape in the critical area of the longerons.

I also applied the serial number which wasn’t easy to remove from the carrier sheet due to its fine details. Fortunately Shawn provides 8 serial-no.-sets with his set so you have several chances which I had to take which you will see later 😉.

Then everything was airbrushed. I also have a tip to avoid overspray: When you use the airbrush try to not exceed an angle of 90 degrees when spraying on the surface and the masks-edges. This avoids spraying under the mask if it doesn‘t fit tight.

Now the masks were removed. This is the result:

I thought I was ready but after having looked at some detail fotos I realized that I had to correct 2 mistakes I made:

1) The placement of the serial no. was too high and too far to the right (see photo below)

2) While for the factory applied roundels the fuselage windows were masked this is not so for the squadron applied aircraft codes. The fuselage windows were painted over with the red color and the rest of the window was masked (as can be seen at the letter „A“ in the photo below)

Have a look at Gibson’s AJ-G aircraft on this foto:

So I corrected this by spraying over the serial-no. and applying new masks to the

letters crossing windows:

The final result can be seen in the first 2 pictures of this post.

Here are some additional fotos of the corrections I made:

All in all this was a time-consuming job but in my eyes the result is worth the effort.

Much more better than any decal.

The topic for the next post will be the

preparation of the wings for painting

and the application of the brown camouflage color to them.

I hope that you liked this post and

will visit again when I post the next one.