Few years ago I had the chance to buy a couple of Fujimi models form a hobby shop which closed for a very low price, so I could not resist and went home with about 2 dozens of kits. Among those kits was this Cutlass model and I always had the plan to build a US Navy Aircraft with the natural Aluminum surface. This kind of color scheme was used on a few Navy Aircrafts during the early 60´s, but was soon dropped, cause of it´s almost non existent resistance against corrosion and therefore a lot of maintenance problems. After this the Navy changed the once glossy blue overall to the well known white and gray color scheme which was used till the mid 80`s.

For the model I did not use any aftermarket parts I only added some detail to the landing gear and the cockpit which were scratch-built. After that I covered the whole kit with Bare-metal Foil. which actually is pretty easy to do. The only thing you really have to watch for, is that the surface of the entire model has to be "Ultra-clean", that means ABSOLUTELY no seams, putty or cement on the finished surface, even finger prints should be removed, cause this bare metal Foil is so thin everything and I mean absolutely everything shines through. So you better handle the whole model only with some gloves. The Foil should be cut to the appropriate size of a small section of the model and than I rub it on gently by using either a small soft brush or cotton tips. The result speaks for itself. I had no problem adding the decals later, I only sprayed the whole model with Future afterwards.

As far as I can say it makes a pretty nice model which sticks out of all the other blue/gray models of Navy Aircrafts and I will definitely make another few one.

Photos and text © 2005 by Rene Hieronymus

April 21, 2005

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