Flight 714 to Sydney (HU-16 Albatross)

Ahhh... what an old box! 

Everything was off the sprues. A couple of pieces of the landing gear missing, but this will be wheels up anyway, so I won't miss them. 

Assembled the wing and drilled some holes for the DC motors. Dry fit the fuselage to check the fit. 

As the Rolling Stones says... I want to paint it black! Not spending any time on the interior no one will ever see... 

This is an OLD kit... so it's going to need some TLC to get the seams to close up properly I think. 

Time to get the engines all wired up. Not much to it and the in-wing wheels make it easy to hide the wire path. 

Wing attached... putty galore! 

 

Now to get the wheels in place. The landing gear bits were mostly missing from this jumbled box, but I knew I only really needed the wheels and the covers to make it work. Would have been neat to see the folding mechanism though... oh, well. 

The windscreen fit was horrifying. I had to add 1mm of plastic card to fill the gap. 

Usually I go for the pink primer coat, but since I just used that on my Tintin Short Sunderland project... let's switch things up a bit and go with the white. The grey plastic isn't all that hard to hide anyway. 

You can't tell, but I painted the sides white. Now for some careful masking. I doubled the tape before I cut it so that the zig-zag line would be exactly the same on both sides. The raised rivets extravaganza is going to cause some issues I think. 

Not bad... pretty sharp line actually. I surprised myself! 

Ahhh... and there's what I was worried about with the rivets. The black coat made a bit of overspray where the rivets lifted the masking tape ever so slightly. Not much I can really do about that though... there are rivets EVERYWHERE. I can live with it. 

Added the fuel tanks (painted grey in accordance with my Scale Modeller's Guide to Aircraft from the Adventures of Tintin. Also got some homemade decals put on. I think the ones on the tail are a bit high though... maybe I shouldn't believe EVERYTHING in my guidebook. 

Cut my dinghy free. A bit of silicone and paint will make better water for the base I think.