I recently finished Revell‘s 1/144 C-17 Globemaster III using Xtrascale decals for a RCAF plane. An enjoyable kit with no build issues outside the landing gear. Both nose and main gear have to be added during construction. There is no way to install them at the end of the build. The gear sticks out, so it naturally gets bump as the plane is being built. I broke or knocked the main gear loose 5 times, eventually having to scratchbuild replacements pieces for two spots. I knocked the nose gear loose twice, and both times squashed it with my chair wheels when searching for it. There wasn’t much left after the second time, and I pretty much had to scratchbuild a replacement.
i did have a problem during painting that caused a lot of extra work. The under wing area, between the fuselage and the inboard engines, proved to be a dead zone when spraying. No matter how hard I tried, I ended up with rough paint. This is caused by paint droplets getting caught in a vortex, between the fuselage, wing, and engine, and drying. The dried droplets then land on the model, creating a sandpaper like surface. I have had this happen on other planes, between the wing and fuselage, and have simply sanded it out. I have never previously seen such a rough finish as I had this time, and naturally, the area was very tight and difficult to sand. I should have painted the area in two steps, first masking the fuselage to paint the wing, then masking the wing to paint the fuselage. Any dried paint droplets land on the masking and can simply be removed when the masking comes off. I tend to be too impatient when spraying, and want to get it all done at once. Something to think about on future kits.
The markings seemed very faint when placed on the kit. I have pictures of two different C-17 from air shows that showed dark grey markings. The decals were a much lighter grey and were hard to see against the base color. Searching the internet, I eventually found pictures of RCAF C-17 with the light grey markings. It seems these were used earlier in service. I recently bought a stencil cutter, and should have tried to cut masks to spray the darker grey versions. I did use the stencil machine to make masks for the canopy section. It needed a lot of trial and error, taking three attempts to get it right, but the final masks worked really well. I also used the machine to cut masks for the wheels, and that worked much better than try to paint all those wheel hubs by hand.
The other new thing tried in this build was washes from Flory Models. These are water based clay washes, and worked really well. You simply slop it on with a brush, let dry, and then remove excess using a slight damp paper towel. It proved simple to use and worked really well.
Happy with the finished model. No in-progress photos this time. I out a Dash 8 alongside it for a couple pictures. The finished kit is huge compared to the other 1/144 kits, and takes up a lot of space on the shelf.
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