Landing-gear detailing and decals

welcome back to my blog. Today I will describe how I detailed the landing-gear, painted the wheels and applied the decals.

The hydraulic piping on the main landing gear is quite visible from the front. Therefore it is necessary to replicate the hydraulic piping on the main gear struts:

view from the front

I used this foto, fine silver coated wire and small stripes of Tamiya-Tape for the detailing. Tamiya-Tape was used to replicate the clamps holding the pipes at the struts.

This is how it looks like after application and painting:

right main landing gear

left main landing gear.

Text thing to finish was the weathering of the wheels. Here I also had an interesting foto as a basis:

Since Scampton was the operational base of 617 Sqn without a concrete but grass landing-strip I chose to weather the wheels with sand and mud colors.

This is how they turned out:

Then I fitted the wheels to the legs and

connected the hydraulic-pipes to the wheels. Eduard provides the blocks on the wheels in which I drilled holes to put in the fine wire:

And finally some pictures of the test-fitting of the landing-gears in the wheel-bays:

After this I moved over to the decals application. Since all markings and some stencils had already been painted on I only had to apply a few stencils to the tailplane, fuselage and wings.

The instructions from HK are not fully correct, since the place, were the decals “walk aft of this line“ should be placed isn’t correct. I used fotos of the BBMF Lancaster to apply them correctly.

For preparation of the surface I used Pledge Floor Polish which I brushed to the areas where the decals would be placed.

I didn’t paint a gloss surface all over since I want to test, if it is possible to spray only the decals and painted on markings with flat varnish in order to keep the effect I created with the airbrush for the complete camouflage. If this doesn’t work I will return to the traditional procedure of painting an overall gloss varnish to the complete model and then apply the flat varnish.

To keep the areas to be painted with flat varnish as small as possible I masked the decals after application and sprayed the original colors.

Here are some pictures of the actual status:

right wing upper side

left wing upper side

wing underside 1

wing underside 2

wing underside 3

(other wing is similar, therefore no pics)

tailplanes underside

fuselage 1

fuselage 2

fuselage 3

fuselage 4

fuselage 5

This was all for this post. In the next post I will show you how I installed the landing gear, the gear-doors and the small parts (antennae, balloon-deflectors, etc.) and how the airbrushing of the flat varnish turned out and in consequence if my plan worked or not.

Looking forward to meeting you in my blog.