This is the very
poor Hobbycraft Tutor, which gets improved vastly with the resin set from
Uncle Bill's Hobby (made by Wayne Hui). I owe Uncle Rick a vote of
thanks for his help in showing me where to find the resin set on Wayne's
site, which immediately sold me on it. I used Belcher Bits decals
and Alclad polished aluminum paint. This model represents the
aircraft I flew for 5 years, first as a student and then as an
instructor at the Big 2 in Moose Jaw Saskatchewan (over 1,600 hours in
this little sports car). It was a joy to fly, and just challenging
enough to teach everything a military jet pilot needed to learn before
going on to operational aircraft.
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The Hobbycraft
kit has very deep panel lines, but I didn't bother filling and rescribing,
so they are too prominent. I also didn't use the resin nose wheel
well - it looked too daunting to do all that carving out in the fuselage,
and I am not a super detailer. The resin set really was worth it,
though, in the cockpit area. This is such an open-air cockpit that
the kit parts would have looked terrible. Note that some pics show
the seats without the black in the hole where the shoulder straps come
out. Amazing how that little bit of colour makes such a difference
in realism.
You'll notice that I
used a black undercoat to set off the Alclad. I'm fairly happy with the
results of the paint, but Bare Metal Foil is still my preferred natural metal
finish. These aircraft were kept spotless; I didn't use any weathering.
Note that on the tail I had to hand-draw the silver outline for the Canadian
flag - the decals omitted this important detail. Enclosed is a pic of my
late father's last flight in the military in 1984 - we flew together on
that trip. We were instructing at the Big 2 for 3 years at the same time,
and flew often together. He stepped out of the aircraft pretending to have
a sore back from all my hard landings - always the joker!
Dan
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