The aircraft Zlin ZXII was built ...
More about Zlin ZXII on wikipedia
The kit is sort of RS classic, made of softer light brown plastic with nice detail, small fret of PE parts and clear bits that are a bit thick fot the scale. After the first check of the parts, I noticed the problematic part would be to assemble the tripods of undercarriage that come separately and with no placing pins it is not easy to complete that.
I started with - surprise, surprise - cockpit. I strongly recomend to dry fit everything first, as the fuselage halves are quite thick, and you will need to modify the instrument panels to fit and to place the seats to correct places. the separation part of the front and back cockpit needs to be sanded to fit in the place and to enable to place the canopy as it is far to big.
After finishing the fuselage, the wings were attached. Again the attention has to be paid to it, as there are no leading pins and to maintain the correct placement is a bit tricky. Same goes to stabilizers.
I selected an aircraft of Jan Ambruz, as it was The only Czechoslovak schema provided and overall blue camo with the imatriculation and competition number looked cool to me.
I painted interior before assembling the fuselage with the light grey mixing the tone that I supposed was more less correct (used references from other Czechoslovak fighters) And then applyed a bit of oil paint to get out detail.
When the assembly was done, missing the canopy and the screw, I masked the cabin and sprayed the whole plane with surfacer 1000. When that was dry I corrected some scratches and errors repeated the surfacer spray on the corrected places and left the paint dry for few days. Then the blue Revell was sprayed all over the plane, using once more mixed tone using the colour instruction sheet as a guide, as the codes of colours are not in the instruction at all. Then I continued with details, masked the wheel disks (yes, I sprayed them blue first :)) and hand painted the rubber, using dark grey colour Last, I painted the propeler pretending wood and glued into its place. Last, I hand painted the canopy frames and glued it with the superglue.
Nice, neat, simple and pretty easy to build model of the "forgotten" Czechoslovak plane.
June 2009