Since I had already cut the center float off of my Kingfisher for the SAAB project I decided to build the land-plane version. The hard part was finding a suitable paint scheme and this took some research time. I found a beautiful (to me, at least) camouflaged airplane and this was the final decision. The building of the kit was very simple, no real enhancements other than seatbelts in the cockpits and some extra detailing on the engine.
My particular kit was an original issue from the 1960s and the plastic was quite brittle and broke easily. The landing gear struts were not in the best of shape for my needs so I substituted the excellent Scale Aircraft Conversions OS2U white-metal upgrade set. I modified a couple of bombs from my spares box to represent the standard depth-bombs carried by these patrol birds.
Painting was in the mid-war three-color (or four color, depending on your point-of-view) scheme. This part was an adventure. The white is "modern" ModelMaster. The dark blue came from my 35 year old Humbrol tin, and went on like a dream. Sadly, the intermediate blue from my ancient Humbrol collection was unuseable (this is the first of ten or so of these old tins that has been unsprayable). I picked up a bottle of MM for this color to complete the scheme.First I sprayed the white bottom, then the non-specular sea blue on all topsides. Then some masking of the wings and empennage areas before spraying the intermediate blue on the sides. Of course, the demarkation line of the intermediate blue is soft-edged on the fuselage itself. Next step was to apply the very simple decals. These came from two 30 year old Microscale decal sheets. As I had selected an anti-submarine patrol aircraft, a ragged overspray of dirty white then was applied to the sides of the fuselage and leading edge of wings and horizontal stabilizer.
The airplane depicted represents a macine from VS-44 stationed in the West Indies in July of 1943.
Vought OS2U
Vought OS2U
