Making the Moth

Early decisions needed on drop doors and rear fuselage panel. I've gone for open doors and replacing the rear fuselage section. 

My first ever attempt at air-brushing (green). I hand brushed the ribbing and the levers. 

A very shiny decal for the instrument panel. This looks awful! I guess that's what decal softener is for. 

I've drilled the pin holes for the drop doors. 

First pass of Tamiya XF3 yellow - will be doing the wings and fuselage tops in camo green/brown. 

Painted the joystick tops red in an attempt to make them visible... but no one's going to see them. 

I had to bend the rear part of the seat-bar to get the back seat to tuck in front of the bulkhead. It wanted to sit behind the b/head, which would have been no use to anyone. And is it just me, or are the seats set way too low here? I'm trying to picture how long the pilots' torsos need to be for their heads to see over the dashboard. 

The instrument panels are in!  

The fuselage is finally closed and I've filled and sanded the seams... yeah, all that yellow was utterly pointless and will have to be done again. 

My first go at filling and sanding a seam. Pretty happy with that! 

The fuselage insert was never going to fit perfectly, no matter what I did, so filler to the rescue! 

A pic I found of the actual plane taken by Lorence R Fizia at the Lossiemouth Airshow in July 1968 - note the wheels don't have the DH monogrammed hubs that are in the kit. 

Picture taken by R.A. Scholefield at HMS Sanderling, Abbotsinch (now Glasgow Airport) in 1962. Again, this is the actual plane that the Airfix model depicts and I think I'm going to have to pivot to the silver paint scheme as I've fallen in love with the story of this plane. 

Had to fill two small gaps (one on each side) where the wing joins the underside of the fuselage. Damn it's hard to get into those spaces to sand off the excess. 

Next up, some of that silver paint it's sitting on!  

Used tape and maskol (and quite a bit of patience) to mask off the cockpits and the nose. Man it looks ugly. 

Getting the tape to wrap around the rounded tops of the instrument panels was quite the job. And there's no tape under the sponge in the nose... let's see what happens there. 

No idea why people put sponge in the gaps but I'm happy to trust the various videos I looked at on cockpit masking and follow their lead. 

First coat of silver on - though you can still see faint shimmers of yellow if you look hard enough - also, totally forgot to fill the seam through the sliders and the nose seam is alarmingly visible. 

Getting this itty-bitty part onto the side of the engine cowling was ridiculously difficult. You can still see (even though the focus is a bit off) the nub left over from the sprue but I couldn't find a way to hold it securely enough to shave it off. 

I fear the filling near the front is a bit too visible but it's not a bad finish. Happy enough. 

The second round of filling and sanding under the slider at the rear has gone way better than I expected. Very happy with that. 

It has a tail now but it was another case of forcing the fit and more filler will be required... mostly underneath. 

Not a great pic but managed to do a half decent job of not splashing black onto the wheel hubs. The silver was airbrushed, the black was roughly airbrushed and tidied up with a brush. 

Having problems with this flat black... it's not very flat! Very glossy finish, which is annoying. It also remains weirdly tacky making it difficult to handle without becoming very dirty very quickly. 

Fitting the vertical part of the tail, and had to nip off the back end of the fuselage to get it to fit. Some filling required here. 

The engine cowling has been dry-fitted. The little side intake was lost to the carpet monster- it came off while painting the inside of the front intake - so I've had to make a replacement from a piece of sprue. It's way too big, I know. 

A closer view of the home made replacement bit on the side... too big, dammit. 

The state of the union. 

With a new vent, drilled out and sprayed, and the prop added. I had hoped that the prop would turn but it was too tight in there and any glue at all was bound to squeeze out and stick it to the front end... which it did. 

Historic photos show this panel to be the same colour as the rest of the plane, but the instructions said 'gun metal grey' and the Airfix box art suggested a slightly bronzed look. Either way, I wanted to paint it. 

Bronze it is! Paint went on a bit heavy though. After the first pass it left just a bronze sheen, almost translucent. I should have left it like that.  

The bronze looks okay, I think, but the tail needed some more filler work, so another dose of silver required. 

Masking for the yellow 'trainer' bands is underway. The silver over the tail filler has gone on great... am I done with the silver at last? 

Wasn't entirely happy with the mix for the yellow, but it seems to have gone on okay... but can you see that on the bronze panel? Is that yellow paint? 

Upper wing shows that the edges of the yellow have a bit of a ridge going on. I'm not surprised, I went a bit too heavy with it. 

Oh man, would you look at that! Not good. Yellow got on both the silver and the bronze. Damn. I'll have to fix that tomorrow. 

How on earth did I let that happen? Overall, quite pleased with the yellow bands til I saw that. And there's a smudge further up the fuselage too. Oh well, on we go. 

Added the wheel frame before taking on the latest Silver fix - only one support strut in because the other one snapped in half while clipping it off the sprue. Disaster! 

A poorly repaired wheel frame strut. It broke again when trying to fit it. 

In other disaster news, I fitted the strut that wasn't broken onto the wrong side... here it is on the correct side. 

It was time. I bought an LED magnifier and it has immediately transformed what I am able to do. Best modelling buy ever. 

We go again on the silver fix, so the nose has been masked... for the 3rd time! 

Masking the windshields almost drove me crazy - couldn't have done it without the new magnifier. No idea whether this will work out, or be yet another disaster. 

The bench, in all its glory. 

All that tape for two little strips of black paint - a horrible waste of tape. I'll find a better way. 

The right hand walk-strip did not come out well. 

The left hand strip was much better. It's the ridges that make it tricky - masking the ridges was extremely difficult, but I wanted to see if could do it. Turns out, not really, no. Would have been better off using Maskol. Maybe. 

Finally, the cockpit masking is off and the windshields are on. I used tiny dabs of PVA glue, which I've been assured dries clear. 

Port side drop-doors added - edge paint a bit ropey but that's easily fixed. 

You know you're near the end when you're putting the decals on - my first time using Set & Sol, so thanks to Bobby at Genesis for the tutorial video. Very pleased with how the roundels went on. 

Now for the underneath. 

Hit a speed bump here. Each of the yellow bands is flawed in some way. There's a kind of watery stain on the top one here. The lower one has a scratch mark from a knife slip during an earlier disaster. And one of the top wing bands has a chip, showing the silver underneath. I didn't want to go back to the airbrush, but if I left it, those flaws are all I would ever see. 

Yellow bands sorted. Onwards! 

Bottom wing decals on. 

Fuselage decals underway. 

I assume this is 'silvering'? It's the result of not glossing before adding decals. When the light falls on it a certain way, you get this shine. I knew it might happen and many layers of Sol has failed to fix it. But now I know - that's what silvering looks like. 

Getting the top wing on was a bit of a hot mess - like spinning plates. The spars on the wings ended up going in okay, but the two centre spars - connecting to the sides of the fuselage - set in the wrong positions. What you're looking at here is a frantic and doomed attempt to press them in to their join points. 

You can just about see here that neither the front nor the rear spars on the port side connect properly to the fuselage - the other side is way worse, I just couldn't get a good pic of it. 

A closer view of the great spar disaster - the real issue was that the starboard spar wasn't set properly into the groove on the underside of the top wing - which meant it was never going to meet it's join points on the fuselage. 

It took ages to figure out how to fix the spar disaster - honestly, it took about 6 months to get over this hump - the incorrectly fitted centre spar was set with old tube glue, so difficult to shift. So I dropped in some Extra Thin solvent cement and it loosened enough so I could pull it out - clear out the gunge from the groove - and reset the spar in the correct position. 

Now the centre spars meet the fuselage where they are supposed to and I can move on with the rest of the build. 

Time to put the nose on! I had to shave inside the nose section, where it meets the front of the plane, as the fit was just a bit too tight - probably more the paint than the fit, in fairness. 

Gravity doing it's bit as the nose section sets. 

It may not look very clean where the struts meet the fuselage, but it's waaaay better than it was before. 

You can see the damage to the paint where various bits of glue rubbed against it during the fix to the struts. Do I attempt to respray over that? Or leave well enough alone? 

Clipped out the wing strut supports - I assumed it would be easy - it wasn't. They were more securely fixed to the struts than the struts were to the wing. Had to get a nippers in there and even then, two of the struts snapped out of the wings and had to be carefully reglued. 

I went to add the very last part - the rear skid, only to discover it had broken in two, getting it off the sprue. Thankfully, the kit has a wheel option. 

I painted up the wheel, using a silver pen for the arm. Just need to get this solidly attached, and it's done!