Yes, and what makes this funny is that at the year end model club meeting, they decided that the theme for the next annual competition (ie. December 2024) would be to build something as colourful as possible. So, some comments regarding my 'mistake' when I brought this along at the January meet. In fact I'd already been working on this 1:48 scale kit by Roden of the Pilatus PC-6 Turbo Porter. Read on and find out why I was content to sign off now and not enter it for competition later.
Roden produced several kits of this veteran STOL plane, Swiss-built and widely used around the world. A couple of kits represented versions used by the US in Vietnam. Another, a particular floatplane version owned by the San Jose Sharks ice hockey team. And then there's this kit, of the PC-6/B2-H2 special aircraft of the Austrian Air Force, painted up in flamboyant cartoonish colours and flown at air shows and other such events; named Der Bunte Fredi.
The Turbo Porter isn't from one of my favourite areas, ie WWI or 1930s civil, so I viewed this as practice, in a way, and also it could look good on a shelf. I admit it was a relief not to have to think about rigging, for once. On the other hand, I knew I'd put off building it for a long time, because of that marking scheme. Representing this aircraft in a scale model kit was quite a commitment for Roden, as decals can be one of the most expensive parts of a kit to produce. I should have taken a picture of the decal sheet - it was big, with around 40 separate items.
In fact, I wish there'd been even more. Some of the decals were large, notably the four covering each of the wings, and they could have done with being divided into smaller elements. Wide area decals are always tricky to handle, because they tend to start sticking before you've fully put them in place. In this case, I found that the uneven effect of water on the backing paper and the carrier film led to repeating splitting. The carrier film was definitely the weak point; it was fragile anyway, and I found that with both the large and small pieces, little pieces were absenting themselves, only to turn up later having dried out just where you didn't want them. This is why I had to do a lot of touching up on this model, in red, blue and green. Even that wasn't simple, because none of those colours were the exact same shade. Oh well. It was never going to be perfect, and as always a liberal coating of varnish makes it prettier in the end.
Now for a degree of backtracking. I think Roden did a prodigious job with the design on the decal sheet. It was much more complex than for your typical kit, and they achieved two things really well. First, the colours were in perfect register. They're just primary colours, true, but with this complex scheme it would have been easy to print something unusable. Secondly, the reason for having so many small decals, mainly around the fuselage, is to allow for all possible positioning of the large cabin and smaller pilots' doors. I may not have taken advantage of that, to leave the doors open, but I did appreciate not having to worry about overlapping of door frames etc. I only wish they'd taken the same approach to the wings, because the flaps and other control surfaces were complicated and even if only left in straight flying positions, there were still too many 'gullies' which the decals couldn't settle into.
There were a few decals which I gave up on. There's that area at the front of the fin, which should be green, and then there's the spiral on the propeller cone, which I painted. The problem with each was the same, that the carrier film couldn't cope with curved surfaces. Nowadays I believe Roden have been able to source better quality decals, but for its time this kit was highly ambitious and they did amazingly well with what was available to them.
After all, the finished kit is quite pretty, don't you think? I'd love to see the real Der Bunte Fredi doing its thing at an air show, these STOL planes are spectacular when they show off their short take offs and even shorter landings.
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