Curtiss Hawk 75 – Hobby Craft Hawk 75

Hawk 75 – Chinese Air Force, Loiwing 1942

Another Metal finish airplane, ’cause I’m just a glutton for punishment. As usual, I started with the cockpit which was decent out of the box. The panel was just painted and drybrushed. The cockpit floor is completedly devoid of any detail as you can see so I added a steel wire on the left side. But I didn’t really do more since once the cockpit was closed up, you couldn’t really see down there. I’m definitely of the school “If you don’t see it, Its NOT gonna be in there”.

   
Here’s the plane fuselage closed up. The next picture shows the bottom of the plane which required significant filling with putty where the wing meets the fuselage and around the bottom seam. The same with the cowling once in place.

At this time I opened the shell shoots underneath the wings.The rest of the building was pretty straight forward.

So I decided to learn some new techniques this time around. First was using Alcad II for the natual metal finish, but this time I masked off different sections for a more convincing look. Since the Chinese planes usually took a beating, I’ve weathered this plane a bit more then usual for me. This included using a silver pencil and silver paint pen to draw in worn paint in the cowling and over the national markings along the panel lines.

The walkway black was weathered with salt (via the IPMS Stockholm site). You merely wet the model a bit and then sprinkle salt onto the area. Let it set a bit and paint as usual with an airbrush on in this case I uses spray cans as my airbrush died at the thisprecise moment. After the paint has dried a pit, scrape the salt off.

Finally the small bits like gun site and the antenna were added. The antenna were installed using WWI biplane rigging techniques, I drilled a hole in the right wring and droped a bit of superglue instant cure, dipped the end of the antenna (fishing wire painted blank buy running it thru a black marker) in superglue, and then inserted into the hole. Instant bond. The 2nd hole on the right wing was drilled thru, the line inserted all the way thru and pulled taunt and secured with a drop of superglue. The antenna was then cut off and touched up with paint.