See http://www.swannysmodels.com/Weathering.html

The stuff on washes is pretty good. Try Tamiya ‘smoke’ acrylic paint, thinned and brushed on then dabbed off with kitchen towel. The trick is to emphasise the panel lines without making the model look like someone’s smeared oil all over it.

Really, it’s all about experience, but it frustrates me when the modelling magazines blithley say ‘I then weathered the exterior’ without giving frustrated novices any idea how they achieved the fantastically lifelike exhaust stains, paint chips and so on.

One tip I have heard but not yet tried is to use pastels – grind conte crayons (apparently it has to be conte) into powder and brush on. You can then brush as much as you want back off again depending on how dirty you want the model to be, then seal with a coat of Johnson’s ‘Klear’ floor polish.

Modelcraft have reissued the Matchbox Twin Otter, so I’m not surprised they are doing the Stranraer. I think they are Canadian, so anything that served in Canada should sell well.

This makes sense. They also have a Firefly which I have built – nice model, when the rest of the parts arrive. It’s odd, almost like a vacform – they give you the shape of the aircraft and the rest is up to you. According to the UK distributors, they have a couple of their own toolings and the rest of the range is reissue. I think there are lots of Frog/Novo kits – the artwork on the Swordfish box looks like a bad scan of the Novo box top!

I have heard that Modelcraft are issuing a couple of new kits, including a Stranraer and the rumour is that this is likely to be the Matchbox re-issued. The prevailing view seems to be that the Stranraer was one of Matchbox’ best kits and even bears comparison with today’s offerings.

I have just been reading about Buccaneers taking part in Red Flag exercises ( you can keep your putnams. my latest book cost 20p in a charity shop). Anyway the book mentions a desert camoflage scheme but only shows a black and white picture. Does anybody have a colour pic of this scheme.

The colour scheme is reproduced in the Ad Hoc publications Aeroguide 30 on the Buccaneer. It can also be seen by clicking on the link I gave earlier, i.e. http://www.blackburn-buccaneer.co.uk/0_Contents.html – the model artwork for the Czechmaster Resin Bucc shows this on the lower right.

The scheme was applied using a supposedly removeable acrylic paint, which had a habit of baking onto the aircraft’s normal paint job when exposed to too much heat – hence the camoflage being left in the normal RAF green and grey behind the jet exhausts. However, the hot Nevada sun did the same to the paint so when the aircraft came back to the UK, they could not get the paint off too easily. As the same aircraft were due to take part in an ‘arctic’ exercise, the stone/earth was painted over with white/grey wraparound scheme. This is an even rarer paint job to see pictures of, but is quite striking.

In terms of that second to last shot, I’ll have a look – I’ve probably made a mistake w/ the filenames, I usually do :p

Jamie.

As I said, sorry to be picky but I know how annoyed I’d be if I found out I had something labelled wrong ages later, at least now you’ll probably be able to find out what Spit it is.

BTW I see you come from Walton on the Naze – I used to live down that way and went to school just down the road at Tendring High School (as was). Small world…

Ah, the dangers of anecdotal knowledge.

Those are some good pictures. Interesting the pic of the Spit with the 5 bladed prop – watching the film again I was impressed with how well the Spitfires in the foreground all looked like MkIs and IIAs – presumably lots of MkVs with the cannon removed? Normally in productions much after the war there are lots of MkIXs and the like thrown in, but in BofB they successfully seem to ‘trick’ the later marks so they add to the action but not so you would know they weren’t the right model.

Don’t know if anyone can help with this, but in the sequence where the Polish training squadron ignores orders and goes into action, the foreground shows three Hurricanes in ‘vic’ formation with other vics behind. In some shots these ‘extra’ aircraft look like Spitfires – but in other shots they look like Buchons… This would make sense as the Buchon is closer in shape to a Hurricane than a Spitfire is, but can anyone confirm which it is? Or is it both? Were there RAF-liveried Buchons used in BofB?

Particularly pleasing for me is the inclusion of the score by Sir William Walton, who as I recall was commissioned to write the score but in the end only one piece was used, which I think was called ‘the battle in the skies’ and provided the superbly chilling soundtrack to the frenetic September the 15th sequence. After watching the film last night with the original score, I stuck the beginning on again, this time with the Walton score – very different in tone to the original (I forget the name of the guy who wrote it, who also did the Dam Busters and 633 Squadron – I want to say Percy Granger but I don’t think it’s him…) and almost like watching a totally different film. I’ll get round to watching the whole thing with the restored Walton score… well, the next time my wife is away.