Designed to kill - converted to save: Cal Fire's North American Rockwell OV-10A Bronco
Well, that´s how far I got with the Academy kit
Fresh start with the ICM kit. Fit is fine. Detail is nice.
The sponsons are not cast on but are seperate pieces. This makes it much easier to leave them off. Using the sponsons as guide some plastic card is cut out to fill the gaps (0,5 mm at the sides, 0,8 mm at the bottom).
I deviated from the color recommendations of the instructions as the Cal Fire machines have a light grey interior with silvery grey cushions and red belts. The belts are a mix of scavenged PE parts and crafted ones.
A drybrush with aluminum brought out the details.
Ready for installation. The all grey color looked quite dull but the red belts changed all that. I like the look.
Preparing the fuselage for assembly
Closing the fuselage was a bit of a challenge as I crammed as much lead granules into the very small space that is left in front of the instrument panel.
Piece A10 (the middle piece in pic 7) forms the bottom of the fuselage. Here some sanding and scraping was necessary to ensure a tight fit.
Wings and booms worked like a charm.
Beautifully detailed landing gear - but delicate.
Detail, part breakdown and fit are exceptional. I just love this kit.
A motivational shot and test if the added weight in the nose and the booms will be enough to prevent tailsitting.
Fuselage puttied, sanded and (re)scribed.
The Cal Fire machines have landing lights at the wings too. Cutouts were done.
Holy Moly. Looks like the basic build is already almost done. Did I say, I love this kit?
For whatever reason I am hooked by this plane. And the kit is probably the best I have built so far.
Stabilizer only loosely attached to facilitate painting later.
Canopy not glued yet. Wainting for internal and external masks and want to detail the office a bit more with some of the Eduard and Extratech PE sets I started using on the Academy kit. Still have to make up my mind weather to use the kits props or go for resin ones.
I didn't like the exhausts the way they were. So I removed the horizontal sheets and replaced them with PE after sanding the edges paperthin.
The result with a first coat of Alclad II Airframe aluminum. The typical discoloration has yet to be added.
Heat discoloration done with oils.
A few more bits and pieces added.
Building the cable trees was a bit of a pain but now they fill the cockpit nicely.
Masking set from Clear Prop. Quite a good price but some of the pieces did not detach easily from the backing paper as the cuts were not deep enough. That resulted in fibers protruding from the edges. Those had to be trimmed to get sharp edges. The set provides internal masks too. Here those are already removed again.
The canopy locking mechanism was scratch build. The edges were emphasised with a color pencil as I didn't want to risk a messed up window from drybrushing.
The canopy locking mechanism was scratch build. The edges were emphasised with a color pencil as I didn't want to risk a messed up window from drybrushing.
Landing lights are done with the recess painted black, a lens glued into place and a cover fashioned.
Nearing the painting stage.
Only a detail, but some progress nevertheless. I opted against the provided decals for the prop tips and airbrushed them. A bit of a masking effort and not perfect, but good enough.
All them antennae cost me some time and effort. Luckily my spares box provided most items - or at least the starting point. Here finally the upper side.
And the seven antennae of the belly. The pitot tube from Master was installed too. Now I gotta handle that bird with care.
A few more items to be installed later. The handles for the canopy took me a while to come up with a way to reproduce them. The kit doesn't provide any handles of any kind. I didn't like the PE parts either as they are way too thin. I tried to give them more volume but that didn't look good. I finally tapered a 0.7 mm brass rod in my electric hand drill gone lathe with a file and bend them. Now I think they are ok.
After fixing the usual handful of blemishes that pop up here and there that bird finally received it's primer coat with Mr. Surfacer 1500.
The Cal Fire machines appear speckless on all pictures, so I want to have a rather low contrast for the preshading. I chose H308. Let's see how this works.
Look like I have to practice that stuff a bit more. Have seen something like this looking better elsewhere.
Looking for a red that matches the decals. Draw Decal calls for Insignia Red, but the MRP-color with that name is far off (but looks good for my arctic Bell UH-1N 🙂 ). Placing those two red decals will be a challenge anyway as they need to be wrapped around the extended landing gear and a bunch of antennae. So maybe masking and airbrushing will even be easier in the end.
Kommentare
47 24 October 2023, 19:06
Michael Kohlthe locking mechanism of the canopy is quite a prominent feature of this bird. So I want to replicate it. The PE sets are only a rough guidance. Most will be scratched.
2 November 2023, 14:06
Michael KohlThanks Finn for your nice comment. Yes, actually I am thinking about placing the machine on a Californian airfield with a Bambi Bucket beside it and a (few) palette(s) of fire retardant in the rear. Building the Bambi Bucket is a challenge. Cross your fingers. 🙂
25 November 2023, 20:07
Michael KohlTook me a while to figure out the antenna layout of my Cal Fire plane. This differs significantly from what the kit provides. To make matters even more complicated it changed during the planes life cycle and is not the same for all the Cal Fire Broncos. But now I think I am not too far off with the setup I chose.
27 November 2023, 08:35
Michael KohlWelcome Alec and Robert. Nice to have you around and thanks for the motivating remarks.
27 November 2023, 18:45
Michael KohlWelcome Nicolas. Preshading unfortunately did not lead to the desired result. Let's see how it looks withe a coat of white on.
28 November 2023, 11:48
bughunterBeautiful livree and great work so far! As one can expect from your skillful hands 👍
And DRAWdecal, I used them on my Piper Cub recently. I found a comment about them: "uses UV-curing inks. The inks are fairly thick and very stiff, so your decal doesn't conform to curves very well without dynamite." 😉 Be careful!
28 November 2023, 11:50
Michael KohlThanks Frank for the hint. That will tip the scale even further towards masking and airbrushing.
I have to admit, that - as much as I like their subjects - I am rather disappointed by the decals themselfs. They lack crispness. Particularly the borders of black items such as Numbers or letters or lines are quite blurry. Areas of color are not evenly printed but have a grainy appearance. So for an endeavor that specialises in decals I was unpleasantly surprised when I inspected them.
28 November 2023, 12:23
bughunterYep, so I masked the bigger black parts of the marking. The small elements were ok, and the white was printed very bright on top.
28 November 2023, 12:44
littleblackbearI'm following this project closely! I have plans to build a Cal Fire Bronco in 1:48. I live close enough to MCC, their main base near Sacramento, and see them flying in and out regularly. Such a fascinating plane, and I'm doubly keen on their new role in helping fight wildfires.
Excellent work on this build. Stunning detail and I have so much respect for being able to do that at 1:72!
4 May, 13:10
Album info
The California Fire Department uses quite a few Broncos as spotter and lead planes to detect fires and guide the water bombers to the spot. So my Bronco will be one of them.
Cal Fire operates OV-10A and D and did some modifications to them. Some have 3-blade props, some 4, some 5-blade ones. Antenna configuration seems to be very variable too. The main modification for the kit will be the omission of the weapon sponsons.
I will go for an earlier version of an OV-10A with a 3-blade prop.
Reset.
I started this project with Academys well known kit and pimped it with CMK and Eduard stuff with quite some effort - and the effect that the canopy would not fit anymore and the removal of the sponsons turned out to be rather elaborate. Thus to the shelf of shame it went.
Then came the ICM kit in scale 1/72 and I got one for a reasonable price. I checked it to estimate the effort for the conversion and it seemed managable. So, to the bin the Academy project went - not until I scavenged some still useful PE stuff. Let´s see how the ICM kit builds. I just had to start it.
