Payen Pa.350

Resin parts from Unicraft have terrible quality. 

I'm using MRP's Mr.Filler and Milliput as a putty. Milliput can be "thinned" with isopropanol. 

The parts doesn't even match the reference. Needs lots of modifications. Still maybe easier than scratchbuilding... 

 

 

So much work with applying putty and sanding. I also prepared new front wing from styrene sheets to replace the wrong one. This won't progress for two weeks while I'm on holiday. 

Still much to fix, but propably it gets easier when the fuselage is put together. I used "gorilla glue" aka polyurethane adhesive. 

I added again a lot of Milliput to fill the gaps. Also sanded the model of the new front wing. 

Most of extra milliput sanded off. 

Airbrushed Mr.Surfacer and noticed, that it is still far from smooth. Also noticed from the picture that the engine is slightly tilted. Maybe it is just exaggerated from this point of view so I'm not going to fix it. 

The original Unicraft resin was too brittle and hard so I recasted the fuselage and the wings. I'm being lazy and assuming symmetric wings so I don't need to make left and right wings separately. 

I made a jig from foam board and blu tack. Then I secured wings' position with thin CA glue. 

More Milliput! 

Let it dry and then there will be more sanding... Atleast I get more motivation when it starts to look like a plane. 

I'm basically making new prop from scratch. Let's see how the carving foam holds. 

I'm turning it with just a normal screw driver 

The carving foam is pretty fragile and porous. Maybe not the best option here. 

 

Rudders are in place. 

My resin might be too old or I mixed it too harsh as my fuselage has a lot of pinholes due the bubbles. They are almost impossible to fill... 

More details on the engine. The cooling air exit is made of a metal sheet from a spare photo etched part. Exhaust pipes will be put to the holes after some painting. The pinholes are nasty and I'm currently trying to fill them with water diluted plastic putty with a needle.  

 

Finally making the cockpit. The instrument panel might be the only original part from the kit. 

I tried to put on the original canopy part that had very unclear frame lines. That resulted about 1mm width frames that I cut from aluminium foil tape. I thought that the frames could hide the ugly boundary and glue. But the aluminium is too thin and is ugly... I had to remake it. 

I had some very thin brass plate that isn't foil. 

New clear canopy from some random clear plastic I found. 

It is in place and is much smoother, but the brass canopy frame might be too wide... 

Here the front of the engine is matched with propeller spinner. The gap is filled with plastic putty and Surfacer 1000. The spinner is "glued" with liquid mask.  

Engine matches now well and I got propeller parts casted. It would be too difficult to make the propeller rotary so it will be just static. 

Black gloss primer 'cause I thought it would work... 

Some pre-shading 

Black primer was a mistake bacause the blue paint I used didn't covered it well. I had to paint so much layers that the pre-shading disappeared. 

Had to make some progress so I added the landing gear. Wheel might be from Sukhoi T-50 and other is from scratch. 

Dry fitting propeller for motivation. 

 

I made exhaust pipes from injection needles. I drilled the holes too deep and cut the pipes too short, so of course one of the pipes sinked too deep. I had to cut a very short piece to glue on the surface. 

First varnish layer and decals from Payen 22 kit. The big white number 3s is from my old leftover box. Number 2 is more common in other Pa.350 models for some reason, but I didn't have that number in hand. It also should be white, so I could not print it myself.