McDonnell Douglas DC-10-30 KLM

Where one of my kids got to in the past. Half built, half painted but all parts are still there and the decals of this little kit look nice. The kit itself looks pretty horrible though… 

A bit of aceton made quick work of the blue paint. I later discovered that the wings were painted white as well, which was stripped off with oven cleaner. 

The center engine fan was installed skewed due to the terrible fit so I broke apart the fuselage, causing some damage to the fin. 

Fixed up the intake, reassembled the fuselage and installed wheel doors 

And then quite a lot of sanding, filling and scribing to remove glue fingers, restore panel lines, etc. Opened up exhausts and added exhaust cones as well. 

Installed the wings and filled the wing roots. Fit is sloppy allround. 

The stabilizers looked oversized which was confirmed using a three-view scaled to size. Their span is a couple of mm too big with the error at the root. So some chopping needed to fix that.  

Primer coat is on. Needed to sand down the elevators as evidently some old acrylic remained that reacted with the lacquer. Also installed the engines. 

Tail sprayed white and masked 

WtB fairings and lower nose sprayed light gull grey. Undoubtedly not accurate but I happened to be spraying this color for my F-14 build so went with it. 

Masked the WtB fairings and lower nose. Noted I needed some filling around the pylons. 

Sprayed on the light blue. Ended up with a finish that was far too coarse.… 

… so carefully tried to polish the blue coat. And immediately damaged it beyond repair. Darn. No choice but to fully sand it back. Broke off the engines and wing tips in the process (again…). Sigh. 

All fixed again and sprayed the coroguard, a mix of grey and aluminium which looked awful so I resprayed it later with grey… 

Second try for the blue. Still a bit coarse... This little plane is rapidly becoming an airbrushing nightmare. 

After masking sprayed on a final coat of Vallejo Air Aluminium. But pulled off some of the grey after removing the masking. Sigh, bring out the airbrush again… 

Handbrushed the exhaust and finally, after a gloss coat, it’s time for the decals! 

The decals worked fine but later saw that some wrinkles remained after dousing the decals in Micro Sol. Oh well, when it rains... 

Finished off with a semi-gloss coat which surprisingly hid a lot of the not so smooth finish. 

Installed what passed for the landing gear. Fiddly little wheels and also the wrong size on the center gear. But no suitable replacements so had to let that one slide… 

Kit finished but decided to add a base from some scrap wood. Test fitting in progress. 

Sprayed the base gloss black and added a printed runway 

Done! Nice diversion from my other builds but not as easy as expected…