1:72 Ed Force One

It all started in june 2016, when Iron Maiden did their ‘The Book Of Souls World Tour’. I saw a lot of pictures about the Boeing 747-400 Ed Force One, but never thought of having a model of it.. until Amsterdam was the location of their next concert, and the 747 would land and stay overnight on Schiphol Airport. I had a day off from work, nice weather, so I went to Schiphol to try to get a glimpse of the Ed Force One.
And that happened, I had a nice place at a secured gate somewhere at a cargo platform.

Waiting for it’s crew and the band to arrive..

Eddie on the tail!

So I took some pictures, and what do you think.. at one moment Bruce Dickinson and the rest of Iron Maiden arrived, and I managed to to take a picture of him while speaking to the crew and entering the plane.

There’s the captain, Bruce himself flying ‘his’ plane 🙂

The Ed Force One was originally an ‘Air Icelandic’ Boeing 747-400, leased for this world tour.

So at home I thought of an idea to make an ‘Ed Force One’ out of an old and damaged 1:72 Skyland KLM Boeing 747-300 desktop model.

I bought that model a few years ago for a nice price, because it has wear and tear and little damage.

From a distance it looks like a nice clean model...

..but behold, a badly broken and repaired engine..

...a damaged flap hinge with a piece missing..

...very badly applied decals..

...and the cockpit window decal is applied out of line.

So time for a ‘Heavy Metal’ overhaul! I also had a 1:200 Hasegawa Boeing 747-400 without box an without decals. As the ‘Ed Force One’ decal sheets come in scale 1:144 and 1:200, I thought of making a 1:200 version too for a friend of mine who is a real Iron Maiden fan.
Here’s the scale comparison of the 2 models...

So I contacted Ben Sweezey from V1 decals, and asked him if he could enlarge the 1:200 sheet for me to 1:72.. he was enthusiastic about the idea 🙂 so I ordered both decal sheets for the 2 kits. And they looked great:

Test fit of the ‘Eddie’ tail

So the sanding started.. lot’s of sanding paper, as this is a model with 1 meter span and 1 meter length

Last look at the Queen’s original KLM Blue jacket..

...almost finished sanding..

..and she’s ready for a primer gray base color.

First I scratched 2 wingtips, as the model 400 has added wingtips for better fuel efficiency.

A little filler and sanding and the wingtip is ready.

Primer coat

Smooth and ready for spraying.
I used only spraycans Tamiya paint for this project, as it’s a sleek desktopmodel with no fine details, so the effort of spraying this big model with a little airbrush is not done. Too much refilling and diluting paint, a spraycan is easier.

White for body and tail ( the Eddie tail decal is partly transparant so the white color highlights the lighter skull colors).

Copied the decal sheet on paper, so I could safely test fit if everything fits well.
And this way I could precisely put marks where the decals need to be applied on the big white body surface, because there are no more reference lines or windows from the old KLM livery.

Looks impressive already!

Masking tape. Lots of it, and plastic bags for the bigger surfaces to spray ‘corroguard’ grey walkways on the wings.

It’s not the exact color, but it is a hard to find paint as corroguard exists from grayish anti skid material. It seems that it even has little glittering parts in it, so it’s difficult to make it exact as the real life color.

Yes, the underside of the wing had also ‘corroguard’-like plating.. which I don’t understand why?

I wanted to give the engine exhaust platings a shiny chrome-like look, so I bought a Molotow Chrome marker as a try-out to see if it’s really as chrome as they say.

But it was quite an expensive marker, and I never saw a chrome marker before (the result is always silver/aluminium look) so I tested it..

...and I was amazed! Really shiny result, real chrome-like color. Nice 🙂 !

Just like the real stuff.

After that painting the engine fanblades and intakes.

The first decal.. look at the size, really big

Applying some decal softener to remove bubbles and wrinkles

The decals look impressive at this scale

And now time to apply Eddie on the tail

But disaster struck 🙁 ...

During soaking in water I saw parts of the decal starting to come loose!! I think the transparant parts of the decal were too thin as there is almost no print on them.
Anyway, I ended up with a wrinkled damaged multi-part decal which I managed to apply on the tail in pieces.
The horror..

I put lots of softener on the decal and tried to apply it as good as possible on the tail..

Look at the damage. Wrinkles because the edges of the damaged decal pieces are overlapping each other.

After the softener dried, it was better then I hoped for. But there were still little parts missing (nose and forehead)

Here clearly visible

So on the next decals I applied a layer of Microscale liquid decal film, to protect them from falling apart.

Applying it on the other Eddie decal

Let dry for a few minutes

And behold, perfect result 🙂

Nice tail!

Time to apply the Eddies on the engines

And it’s finished! Ed Force One is ready for inspection

Nicely detailed decals, in this scale even better

Eddy dried up very well with the liquid decal fluid applied

Took the Ed Force One to a friend of mine who is a master in weathering techniques. He won 2 prizes with beautiful built 1:35 WWII dioramas, so I asked him to ‘repair’ the damaged Eddie tail decal

Which he did.

Nice work!

That’s a different engine then the old KLM one 🙂

Final inspection by our cat Bella

Better and more accurate cockpit windows

The complete tour-info as nose art

Putting it on a better quality black stand

And I contacted Mr Ben Sweezey from V-1 again that my project was finished; he was very enthusiastic and asked permission to place some of the pictures on his site as an example.
Sure, why not?