1/48th Minicraft Beechcraft Bonanza V35

[ShaunW]

Yes indeedy it's GB Eve and out of the hangar and onto the flightline from yours truly is the Minicraft Bonanza. After my last build of the Fokker D7 in eyesight straining 1/72 it's good to be back in my preferred scale for smaller aircraft. Let's have a look in the box then.

Here's the box top art, decals and instruction front sheet:




The destructions are reasonably clear and although the interior detail painting callouts are given as numbers there is no corresponding key to tell you what colours the numbers refer to - two shades of grey it is then with black for the instrument panel I'll have a look on the interweb unless someone on here has a clue. I will probably use paint for the blue and orange stripes as I don't usually like decals for that sort of thing.

Next up, all the bits:




Detail is not too bad at all, with engraved panel lines etc, there is some sidewall detail on the fuselage interior and a half decent engine is also supplied. I think this will possibly be a tail sitter, although no mention is made in the instructions as to the need for nose weight. It just looks tail sittery to me so I'm going to need the engine space for the usual collection of weights.The glazing is a little on the thick side with some slight scratching, despite being separately bagged and will probably benefit from some attention with micromesh polish. The strange looking doofah bottom left is a stand, which is handy for those of you who like to build them gear up. I'm looking forward to the off, especially as we have the benefit of a long weekend, however a fair amount of Saturday will be taken up with my promise to Mrs W to demolish the old garden shed in readiness for something we can actually use!

[Gregers]

Looking forward to watching this one Shaun. I built one of these many moons ago and despite nose weight it still sat on it's rear. Not quite as many moons ago I ended up working on the real thing but that's another story.

All the best.

Greg

[ShaunW]

I was half tempted to fit the engine Greg but I can well imagine that this model is going to need a fair amount of nose weight, I've just been having another scan of the parts and it almost screams "tail sitter" to me!! Now I've finished demolishing the garden shed and tidying up the debris, I'll have a bit of me time in the man cave I think. Apparently the forecast is for rain tomorrow so no gardening, how sad and as you can imagine I'm devastated, oh well I'll have to console myself with some modelling instead

[ShaunW]

I've started as usual with the interior after applying paint yesterday afternoon. The interweb is full of various images of this type and interior colours seem to vary, perhaps some photos are of machines that have been restored or ones that have had customised interiors, especially seats. One thing that did become clear to me however was that there would be a nasty join line visible at the rear of the cabin if built OOB, which would be nigh on impossible to eradicate once the fuse was joined. Therefore, I put together a rear bulkhead out of thin plastic card and also built a luggage rack which, with a lot of imagination, looks something like one of the images I saw on the web. Of course there is a large degree of gizmology here but it looks a lot better than that join line would have done.



Here's the starboard inner side



The cabin sides and rear have been painted with HU 28, which seemed nice and neutral. Next up are the seats and on ticking the Beechcraft options list I went for a nice set of luxury leather seats in a rich Ivory coloured hide upon which to rest my pampered executive backside whilst flying to important meetings etc etc - expensive yes, but then I'm worth it Cabin carpets are in a hard wearing dark grey (HU140).



Then the instrument panel. Oh dear, something of a challenge to paint this one. This is the second attempt and I will try the instruments again, applying paint with a cocktail stick as they aren't well defined enough for my hamfisted attempts to paint with a brush. I've searched my store of decals and don't have any instrument decals suitable for this build. If all else fails I'll leave the instruments unpainted. The glazing on this kit is quite thick and therefore much of the interior will probably be unclear anyway.



Next job to finish the interior is to apply some seat belts, which appear from photos to be of the lap top variety and which I will make out of foil or Tamiya tape. From a dry run, the fit of the kit looks like it will not be good so I'm ready for a session with the filler and sandpaper!

Thanks for looking.

[MerlinJones]

It's your plane, Shaun and you can do whatever you want with it, decoration-wise.

Liking what I'm seeing so far.

Regards,
Bruce

[ShaunW]

Thanks Bruce, I'm looking at it as being an amalgam of various images that I've seen on the web. No building today I'm afraid, the weather turned good and Mrs W had me doing various jobs that I've been avoiding for the last few weeks and now I'm too tired and emotional to start concentrating on modelling. Tomorrow, however, is mine

[Gregers]

Nice work so far. The Beech Banjo was considered the 'Rolls Royce' of the GA market at one time and as such customers tended to pick and choose what they wanted as interior décor goes. IIRC one I worked on had an ivory interior and red leather seats with white piping on the seats and a matching red carpet.
The last Bonanza I worked on now has a non standard hole in the lower rear fuselage. Now there's a potentially 'shocking' story I could tell concerning water ingress, water egress and a 240 volt electric drill.

All the best.

Greg

[Karaya]

Just an idea for the instrument panel (if it's not too late) that I saw during a build elsewhere.

What he did was find a colour picture on the WWW. Scaled it down. Printed it out on photo paper with a home colour printer. Sanded the plastic instrument panel flat and glued the picture on it with PVA glue (apparently some CA glues etc can cause the printer ink to bleed).

It looked pretty good.

[ShaunW]

Thanks for your interest boys. Nice idea re the instruments Sven, but I don't have a colour printer as in my line of work everything has to be in black and white and the printer is part of my home work set up as indeed is this laptop. I'll fiddle about some more later on today.

Just as an aside however, how did this build end up on the AM section? what happened to the civil GB?

[MerlinJones]

Just as an aside however, how did this build end up on the AM section? what happened to the civil GB?

The Civil GB was inadequately supported, in terms of the number of participants and, given a total lack of response to my announcement, I took the decision to close it as a Group Build.
http://uamf.org.uk/viewtopic.php?f=214&t=4004;

Anyway...

The smaller sizes of GA subjects suggests that the larger scales maybe more appropriate. However, given the usually basic nature of GA kits, it looks like you'll end up adding a lot of detail, assuming the transparencies are suitably clear.
Without going to the trouble of replacing the kit transparencies, I'm finding the less-than crystal clarity of the 1/72's an asset.

Regards,
Bruce

[ShaunW]

Right oh, I didn't see that announcement sorry for that but then again the build had my support anyway. Just goes to show that civil aviation in general and GA in particular, is a minority interest - "boring" it would seem to some modellers, fair enough that's their opinion and you can't win 'em all

Anyhow, onwards and upwards and I will continue the build on here. The transparencies on the Bonanza are quite thick and not crystal clear (did I read somewhere that this is a re-issue of an older kit?) and thus I am hoping to get away without doing any super detailing. Not that I'm much of a super detailer. Someone with the requisite skills and/or patience however could really go to town on this kit adding cabin detail, opening up the cabin door etc plus the kit-supplied engine is really quite good although using and exposing it as a feature might cause difficulties regarding nose weight. All in all I think this is a good little kit but I can see problems ahead regarding fit, especially wings to fuselage. But hey, that's why we have filler and sandpaper

Thanks for the info Greg re the interiors, which is what I suspected and explains the various wide differences apparent in web pics.

[ShaunW]

This evening I've managed to squeeze in a bit of Bonanzering, starting with the seat belts. For these I used wine bottle foil, from the top of a Jacob's Creek Cava bottle no less. Not only is this Cava quite a reasonable one for chugging of an evening but it also provides foil that is black on one side and silver on t'other. Just the job then for self-coloured seat belts, using the black side for the main body of the belt and then smaller pieces from the reverse silver side for the chrome latch mechanism. Eduard eat your heart out. The seats have also received a coat of matt varnish to tone down the very glossy Humbrol Ivory colour.



If you cast back to earlier parts of this thread you will note that I have been struggling to neatly paint the instruments, which are not well defined enough for a painter with my lack of ability. Today it finally dawned on me to pull an old technique out of the bag and drill the instruments out, which will then be followed with a backing using plastic card painted in the appropriate colour. Bonanza instruments seem to largely have black or dark grey faces from the images I have found. Anyway, here's the drilled panel, not a super shot but I hope it gives you the general idea. Probably wouldn't win any prizes but at least I'll have round instruments instead of ill-defined black blobs.



At this point, everything was going well and I was starting to feel pleased with myself. Should have known better than that. In a moment of hamfisted idiocy involving the pointing of a brush loaded with Mekpak, I managed to fog one of the corners of the starboard centre window. I wasn't a happy bunny then, I can tell you!



Then I remembered some hard acetate type packaging that I'd seen Mrs W throwing in the bin earlier in the day. Somewhat to her surprise I began to dig about in the household rubbish until I found what I was after. A carefully cut out section bonded in the PVA seems to have done the job.



Thanks for your time.

[MerlinJones]

Good call on the clear packaging.
I'm now in the habit of keeping my eyes open for curved sections.

Regards,
Bruce

[ShaunW]

It was a close call Bruce and I was lucky as the packaging had the correct curvature and could have almost been made for the job. I was so peed off with myself as I haven't fogged a transparency in years. Needless to say, the remainder of the said packaging has now been carefully squirrelled away

[splash]

Good save, but now you can see the detail.