Making the D.520DC and the D.780

One of the things that makes going to Swap n Sells worthwhile is what you find lurking in the boxes of leftover stuff that dealers often have under their tables. You can’t get to them straight away because there are too many bodies pressed together trying to find bargains on the tables themselves, but later on when the crowd has diminished it is time to ferret around in those boxes of odd bits and pieces. And that’s where I found the strange little kits that enabled me to make two conversions to your standard Dewoitine 520 fighter. One of these little finds was the A+V 1/72 kit of the Dewoitine 520DC and the other was the CMR Dewoitine 780. Both were full resin kits but both were at least twenty years old and not very good. Fortunately, I had a couple of not much younger Hobby Boss Dewotine 520s that I could use as donor kits. The more recent RS kits of the Dewoitine 520 are better than the Hobby Boss ones but they are also more fragile and it looked at though converting these kits to make the two deviant Dewotines was going to require a lot of tough handling. Besides, if something went wrong and the kits ended up in the bin, I wouldn’t feel so guilty if they were the Hobby Boss ones.

The Dewotine 520DC was a post war conversion of the standard fighter. Seventeen surviving Dewoitine 520s were gathered up in July 1945 and used for pilot training and, to make training easier, one was converted to dual control (‘double commande’) by the simple expedient of putting a second seat in the space behind the cockpit, installing controls and extending the canopy. Subsequently another thirteen were converted in the same way and the last ones probably flew until around 1953.

The A+V kit of the Dewotine 520DC has almost nothing to recommend it. In comparison to more recent resin kits this one is poorly defined with poor details. In addition to the resin there were some blobby white metal undercarriage legs and a couple of instrument panels for the cockpit, but no decals and the instruction sheet is only a three view drawing of the aeroplane you are supposed to make from the resin parts. Lord help any novice modeller wanting to make a models out of this kit. After a little consideration I decided that the only parts of the kit that were useable were the instrument panels and the vacformed canopy, and then only marginally.

The conversion was fairly simple and involved removing the upper rear fuselage with a razor saw. Before doing this I had to liberate the cockpit canopy from its celluloid, always a tense few minutes made worse this time because the kit did not provide two canopies just in case, as is customary these days, and because, unlike many vacformed canopies, the shape of this one was not well defined and thus needed a lot of careful trimming was necessary before it was ready for use. The reason for doing the canopy first was, of course, to find out how much of the rear fuselage to remove. The plastic in that Hobby Boss kit is very thick so a great deal of thinning ensued to make room for the kit second pilot seat and it was a while before I realized that the seat was wider than the fuselage itself so a scrounge through the spares box found a replacement that promised to actually fit. The kit instrument panels fitted nicely and I added in a couple of other things to make the cockpit look busy which, of course, you can’t see in the finished model. The canopy needed a struggle before it was presentable and, after that, the rest of the kit went together as expected.

I was able to find a few photos of Dewoitine 520DCs on the interweb and they all looked to be in fairly poor condition and bare metal. Tamiya AS-12 Bare Metal Silver works well for this. Decals came from the spares box. I have a goodly selection of decals from wartime 520s but it seems that the French went for a deeper blue in their markings after the war so finding what was needed took a bit of finding. None of the photos I’ve seen had any unit markings, which was a blessing.

The Dewotine 780, more properly the HD.780, was a floatplane fighter designed to meet a 1937 French air ministry requirement for a floatplane fighter that could be used from shore bases and from ships. The Dewotine 520 was the basis for the new design but in order to make a floatplane from it the aeroplane needed a new nose which incorporated the radiator, a cranked wing for the floats and an enlarged tail. The prototype was ready for flight by March 1940 but by then the French had other concerns so it sat, waiting, until the Germans arrived, looked at it and ordered it to be turned into scrap without it having even flown.

If I thought the A+V kit was terrible and of little use, the CMR kit was even worse, on two counts. One was that the moulding was not very good and would need a lot of work to make it useable. The second was that in many ways it didn’t look much like a Dewoitine 780. This may be understandable since any drawings you find of it on the interweb show a Dewoitine 520 fuselage attached to a cranked wing and floats, ignoring the fact that the nose had been enlarged to accommodate the radiator (its existing location under the mid fuselage would not have been very good for a floatplane) and the tail showed no signs of enlargement. My guess is that the fuselage for this kit had been copied from the old Heller kit and would have needed severe improvement and modification to be of any use. Consequently the only really useable parts from the kit were the wings and floats and I decided that it would be easier to convert the fuselage from the Hobby Boss kit with a new nose and tail and fit the CMR wings and floats to it.

The trickiest part of this conversion was finding a way of mating the central fuselage and inner wings of the CMR kit with the Hobby Boss fuselage. It was not a simple matter of mating the wings from one kit onto the fuselage of the other because the wing fillets on the Dewoitine 780 were bigger and of a different shape to the Dewoitine 520 wing fillets. Doing this involved a lot of work with a saw and they grinding down the central fuselage of the resin kit with my trusty Dremel (the biggest work-out it’s had in years) while wearing the appropriate protection because there was resin dust everywhere. Eventually enough of the resin had been turned into dust that the Hobby Boss fuselage slipped into the void, and then there was a lot of filling to do.

My first attempts at the nose and tail were unsatisfactory because there were no plans to guide me and I did not peer carefully enough at the few photos I could find. After a few hours stuffing around I tried again, this time by cutting the rudder off the kit and replacing it with one made out of plasticard and gluing the radiator from the Hobby Boss kit under the nose and then surrounding everything with a big blob of two-part epoxy putty and then carefully sanding it away until I had a shape that look fairly much like what the photos told me. I’m not sure that I’ve got the shape of the tail or the nose exactly right but I doubt anyone is going to do better with the evidence I had available to me.
Having got the overall shape of the aeroplane as good as I thought possible, a great deal of filling and sanding followed to fill gaps and disguise other modelling indiscretions.

There are a number of imaginative side view colour schemes for the Dewotine 780 on show on the web but as far as I can tell from the available photos the only markings on the real aeroplane was the traditional data on the rudder. I’m guessing that the aeroplane was painted only in the two tone Bleu Gris Fonce and Clair scheme which seems to have been the basis of many Aeronavale schemes around this time.

I don’t suppose that there would be too many people interested in making these conversions. Even without the A+V kit is would not be too difficult to make the Dewotine 520DC but it was not flown in a very attractive colour scheme that people would find attractive. As for the Dewoitine 780, there would be too much scratch building for most people if the CMR kit was not available, and probably too much work for most modellers even if they had that kit to hand. But then I don’t have very ordinary modelling tastes, I guess.

I first became aware of the Airbus A.220 while watching sessions of Big Jet TV. Most of you will not be aware of this televisual feast because you don’t think that jet airliners are among the most elegant things that humans ever invented and don’t feel the compulsion to watch them in action for hours on end. That’s your loss. Big Jet TV is very simple in conception and is really armchair plane spotting. This fellow, Jerry, take his video camera to various airport around Europe, and quite often to the United States these days, and live streams airliners landing and taking off from various airports. He puts up with rain, sleet, snow, buffeting winds and every other inconvenience you can think of and, for a very small monthly fee, I get to sit in my warm comfy chair and watch what he sees. It’s not quite the same as being there, you hear something of the rumble that Boeing 747s make as they lumber down the runway headed for destinations half way around the world, but not the air vibrating with the energy of it all. Still, I’m not really that keen to put up with all the privations of getting to, say, Heathrow, for a few seconds of that kind of not inexpensive thrill. If my modelling productivity has gone down in the past few months it’s all Jerry’s fault.

Among all the Boeing 737s, 747s, 767s, 777s and 787s and the Airbuses and the occasional Embraer, Dash-8 and so on, all painted up in an endless array of airliner liveries, many of them nice retro schemes, the Airbus A.220 stands out for its elegance and the simple red and white scheme that Swiss (now of subsidiary of Lufthansa) fly it in. Jerry and I agree that it is probably the most beautiful airliner in the skies at the moment.

The A.220 didn’t start out with Airbus but with the Canadian company Bombardier. They planned it as a slightly larger version of their Bombardier CRJ which they had taken over from Canadair at some stage. They began planning this larger version back at the end of the 1990s but ran into all kinds of trouble that led to delays and program suspensions so the first of what they called the CS100 did not fly until 2015. Part of Bombardier’s problem was that they were not set up to handle such a large and expensive challenge as the CS series and ran into supply problems and delays in getting their Pratt & Whitney engines, the litany of little problems adding up to a big one that went on. One of the big problems was that the CS series would be competition for the bottom end of both the Boeing and Airbus range of airliners so Boeing complained that the CS would be unfair competition for its Boeing 737-700MAX and lodged formal complaints with its US government which ended up with the threat of a 300 per cent import duty. Airbus was more direct and offered it’s A.319neo (a shorter version of the A.320) as direct competition to the CS series and took away sales that Bombardier would otherwise have got.

The end result of all these problems was that the whole CS project was in danger of collapsing and has, since then, got Bombardier out of the aircraft manufacturing business completely. The government of Quebec kicked in $1 billion to keep the project and Airbus came in to take a part share in the project. As things stand at the moment Airbus owns three quarters of Airbus Canada and the Quebec owns the other quarter. Parts for the A220 come from all over the place including Northern Ireland, North America and Europe and are assembled at Mirabel in Canada. A new assembly plant will be opened at Mobile in Alabama sometime soon which will, among other things, increase production capability and overcome any possibility of having to pay import duties. At the end of 2019 107 A.220s had been manufactured, there were orders for several hundred more and there may be demand for around 5,000 more over the coming twenty years. Recently Airbus toured the A.220 around Asia and Australia so I wouldn’t be surprised to see them flying in Australian liveries in a few years time – Qantas is apparently interested.

The list price for an A.220 is currently around $81 million but Airbus claim operating costs 15 to 20 per cent lower than their current competition, which is what makes them attractive. What makes them attractive to me is that they look really nice. Which brings us to making a model of one.

According to Scalemates there were no kits made of the Bombardier CS so this Eastern Express kit is the first one of this airliner in any scale. Hannants are currently asking A$70 for a kit of this airliner in 1/144, which is far from cheap and you might be able to find one for a better price from some Eastern European company. On ebay they are being offered for around US$40, which is not much less that Hannants, given the current value of the Pacific Peso. Still, it’s a lot cheaper than having to buy a real 1:1 A.220 and the Eastern Express kit is the only one on the market at the moment, so there is little choice. Eastern Express offer this kit in a variety of different livery options but since I was keen on the Swiss livery that’s the kit I bought.

The box that the kit comes in is not large, unlike many Eastern Express boxes which are very large and in which the contents take up very little of the internal volume. In this case, the kit parts rattle around a bit, but not so much as to make one truly annoyed. As for the quality of the kit, I was pleasantly surprised. After the horror of some Eastern Express airliner kits, their Boeing 757 comes to mind, this one is rather nicely done. Far from the quality of your Japanese kit makers or even modern Airfix, but at least something that can be built up into a reasonable replica of the real thing without requiring major work. The parts fit reasonably well and don’t require oceans of filler, they appear fairly accurate and the mouldings are still relatively new and therefore fairly devoid of flash.

The most annoying thing about this kit is the instructions. As is common these days, the parts numbering is only determined by peering at a diagram of the sprues and identifying the parts that way. This is very annoying, particularly when the directions on which parts go where are on the other side of the same sheet of paper – particularly if one has the attention span of a gnat and forgets the number while turning over the sheet of paper. The result of this problem for me is that I made a couple of mistakes during the assembly process which are, fortunately, hidden under the wings so you can’t see them, and a couple of parts left rattling around in the bottom of the box when construction was finished. There was really little more work involved in putting this kit together than there is with most of your Revell and Minicraft airliners, a few dabs of filler to take came of a few smallish gaps and the airframe is taken care of.

The most difficult part of the painting is the engine pods which involved seven different paint colours (not that you’d notice). Apart from the leading edges, which were Tamiya TS-76 with a gloss black base, and the undercarriage, the entire airframe is white. This was, as usual, achieved with a coat or two of Tamiya rattle can white primer sanded with micromesh, three coats of white automotive lacquer, also sanded back with micromesh, one coat of Tamiya rattle can Pure White, another rub over with the finest Micromesh, and then a final coat of Pure White. I’ve painted the undercarriage in Airbus grey, as would be correct for Airbus’s other airliners, but since the A.220 is made in Canada it might be a different shade of grey in reality. Tough.

As an aside, for years I’ve been beating myself up about the correct colour of the wheel hubs on airliners. Fortunately for me Big Jet TV goes regularly to Toulouse where many of the Airbus airliners are made and Jerry is particularly fond of zooming in on undercarriage. As a result I can say with some certainty that when Airbus airlines come out of the factory the wheel hubs are painted the same shade of grey as is used on the rest of the basic airliner. Looking at sessions of Big Jet TV shot elsewhere it seems that when it comes to replacing wheels the maintenance crews don’t care what they put on so you could end up with any other colour they happen to have lying about. This means that when I paint my wheel hubs Airbus grey that means the airliners are fresh out of the factory, which explains why the models don’t have any weathering either. That my story, anyhow. I don’t know if this applies to Boeing airliners too, let’s hope so.

Finally we come to the decals which are, like the rest of the kit, pretty good. As usual, I gave them a coat of Tamiya TS-13 clear which has two purposes. One is in the hope of holding them together while they are being applied and the other is because TS-13 and Tamiya Pure White have the same sheen so there is no need to give the completed model a gloss coat which, I think, makes most airliners look quite unrealistic in comparison to the real thing. The decals went on well but the red bands on the tail were not wide enough to cover the entire tail. Fortunately, the other option on the sheet is for Delta and the shade of red on those decals was exactly the same as for the Swiss decals so a few slivers cut from the Delta decals took care of that little problem.

All in all, a nice little model of a beautiful airliner. It is not quite as good as the real thing, but my back yard if not big enough for one of them and neither is my bank balance, so I can’t complain. The thing I like about working in constant scale is that it allows me to compare various airliners and I was surprised to find that the A.220 is not much smaller than a standard A.320. I guess that what makes the difference is what is on the inside rather than the outside.

There are several companies that make limited run 1/144 kits, among them is Welsh Models which started off offering very basic vacformed kits of subjects which were desirable because they could not be acquired from anyone else. Over time other kit makers have intruded into this manufacturers domain with some respectable resin and injection moulded kits. To keep up with the times Welsh Models have taken to offering resin kits of a good standard for smaller subjects and kits with some vacformed parts for things like fuselages and the smaller parts in resin. When you buy a Welsh Models kit you could end up with anything from the original purely vacformed kits right through to the full resin or mixed vacformed and resin kits. For a while there Welsh Models also offered a mixed media kit of mainly vacformed parts with a few white metal parts such as engines and undercarriage. The thing you can say about them is that they are better than the full vacformed kits.

There are a couple of things that make Welsh Models kits quite attractive, one is the overall accuracy of the kits which is generally said to be better than most injection moulded kits, and good decal sheets. The instruction sheets assume that the modeller already knows all about this kind of kit so all you get are some general drawings and generalized instructions. These are very acceptable kits if you know what you’re doing, a bit more work than your standard injection moulded kit but offering a very good finished model if one is willing to put in the extra work.

Over the years I’ve built up quite a collection of Welsh Models kits. I’ve made a few over the years and some, such as the Britannia and Deux Pont, were made when all you got was the moulded plasticard sheets and some white metal propellers. These were a real test of my skills and not the kind of thing that I’d want to go through too often. Even so, I’m always tempted when a new Welsh Models kit becomes available with the result that I have a pile of them that I often look at longingly, but often pass them over in favour of something less adventurous in plastic that will be easier to make.

On the other hand, there are occasions when I need something more challenging (read ‘time consuming’) to make, not because I really feel like challenging myself. On this occasion I was off to Canberra for a week of history work and needed something to keep me busy during the evenings after all the fun died down. This is when I go to the Welsh Models kit pile and pick a kit or two to take with me, more or less at random. One of the kits I picked this time was the Welsh Models 1/144 Boeing KC-135A. It turned out to be from the middle period with most of the pieces located on two sheets of formed plasticard and a bag of small metal parts including some engine pods and undercarriage legs and wheels and the refueling boom. This suited me fine, there is nothing better to do in the evening in a strange city than to spend one’s time sanding the tips off ones fingers. The white metal engine pods were a bonus because there a few things worse in the modelling universe than trying to make decent looking engine pods from vacformed parts.

I was going to write here a couple of paragraphs about the process of liberating part that can be used to make a model out of a sheet of plasticard with lumps moulded into them. However, I know some of our readers have delicate constitutions so I will skip over all this mind numbing activity, which is best tackled when one’s mind is already numb from other things. Suffice it to say that after three evening work I had managed to liberate the parts necessary to make a KC-135 from the sheets of plastic Welsh Models had provided. They included fuselage halves with a couple of formers to help them keep their shape, upper and lower wing halves, the same for the rear fins, and a couple of other bits but I never quite figured out what they were for.

Next comes the interesting part of sticking these basic parts together. A lot of weight needed to go in the nose so the finished model wouldn’t be a tail sitter. I usually do this by kneading up some two part epoxy filler and pushing it into one of the fuselage halves along with a lead sinker of two, and pushing the other fuselage half over the top to make sure it is all snug. On this occasion I also moulded a nice little nose undercarriage bay for he nose undercarriage into the filler as it set, which looks pretty effective in 1/144 and saves having to make something small and complex out of tiny bits of plasticard instead. Next is the process of sticking tiny little bits of plastic along the edges of one fuselage side to help the two parts line up and give the thin edges of the plastic a bit of reinforcement. Finally, I bathed the edges of the parts in a good lathering of glue, put the parts together while trying to line them up as much as possible, then wrapped the thing in a lot of masking tape and set it aside to set for a day.

The wings are easier to glue together, in theory, but it is not common for the parts to fit with any great accuracy so I lined everything up as much as possible sloshed the glue around and wrapped them up in tape and also put them aside to set. Only later did I realize that I’d forgotten to cut the holes in the lower wings for the undercarriage bays – I blame this on the one or more drinks and nibbles events associated with history conferences that may have clouded my judgement. This caused problems later on.

After several nights I had fuselage and wings ready to go together. Needless to say, they showed very little interest in anything resembling a snug fit. Using craft wire I made pins that I stuck into the ends of the wings and then drilled holes in the fuselage sides where the wings should go to give the joins some strength. Then followed a lot of very harsh language as I tried to get everything square – or at least looking square. My techniques is to use lots of blue-tac to hold everything firmly on a solid base and then juggle the parts around until they start to look square, and then pour super glue into the gaps in the hope that everything will hold in place while I use plastic shims, various kinds of filler and a lot more harsh language to make the join as solid as possible. After that there was filler, and more filler, and then more filler before the fuselage and wings began to look as though they were closely associated with each other.

When I got home again I gave the model so far made a good examination and decided, by a narrow margin, against throwing it in the bin. Next was the process of fitting the engine pods to the wings, but it turned out that if I had stuck them straight onto the wings as they were the engines would have been pointing down about ten degrees from what they should be – which would not be really accurate. Getting this little problem fixed was the most difficult challenge of the entire project and if you could look at the model now with x-ray vision you’d see all the little reinforcing blocks, metal pins and varieties of glues and fillers underneath the paint on the pylons.

Finally the engine pods and pylons were starting to look reasonable and I thought it was about time to assemble the undercarriage. It was then that I noticed that I had forgotten to prepare the main undercarriage boxes in the wings, and the kit really did go in the bin. Later, on mature reflection, I decided that I had put so much effort into this model that a little thing like that wasn’t going to stop me. It was too late to try cutting out the main gear boxes but I remembered the kits I’d made in my youth that had lacked such boxes and the undercarriage legs were just stuck straight onto the bottom of the wing. Of course, those were Frog kits made in the 1950s, but it’s a precedent, so let’s not quibble ‘Nobody is going to see it if I don’t tell them’, I told myself, and so I cheated. This is not what any self respecting modeller would do, so perhaps I’ve lost all self respect, at least in relation to this model.

The final significant construction challenge was the rear stabilizers, which showed as much inclination to match up to the fuselage as the wings had earlier. The problem was overcome in the same way that the wings had been attached.

Then followed three or four coats of primer, filling, sanding and more priming as all the blemishes in the model were fixed, and then it was time for painting. The instruction and decal sheet offered options for seven different KC-135s, five As and two Qs (the ones that refuelled SR-71s). All the offered versions were painted in the same all over ADC Grey (Air Defence Command) so I ordered a jar of that shade in the AK Real Color range from BNA (along with a new tube of filler). The jar is relatively big but the amount of fluid in it was rather minor and, as it turned out, just enough to give this model two coats, with nothing left over. There was, of corse, all the engine masking to be done for the Tamiya rattle can metallic paints, have I’ve already told you how much I hate masking.

The decal sheet is rather nice and produced by Liveries Unlimited, which is a kind of recommendation. To be on the safe side I gave the sheet a coat of clear varnish to hold the decals together as they were being applied, and that worked most of the time, so there was a minimum of harsh language for this part of the model making process. After some problems with poor decal adhesion a few years ago I’ve taken to applying decals with a wash of fairly lightly diluted Selly’s Aquadhere but this time I didn’t bother because the plan was to give the model a couple of coats of clear varnish to seal the decals in. However, almost before I’d finished some of the decals started lifting off because the adhesion was so poor so I had to go back and reattach most of them with the glue wash to get them to stick again. That’s something I won’t not be doing again.

Finally, a few bits had to be painted black and then, when everything had dried, on went a couple of coats of Tamiya semi-gloss rattle can lacquer. Then came time for the undercarriage wheels which are white metal. The problem with them is that where there should be holes for the undercarriage legs to go into, there aren’t any, a moulding problem I assume where bubbles got into the holes. It turns out that I’m not very good at drilling holes in white metal in the precise centers of tiny wheels, which makes the resulting completed undercarriage look a bit wonky. But since the entire undercarriage is something of a disaster, it’s just as well that nobody is going to see much of it.

Despite everything, this turned out to be a nice little model, if you don’t look at it very hard. Now I feel the need to make a B-52 to go with it, but I don’t think Welsh Models makes one of those.