Okay, we are getting close to the end. Most of the sub-systems and systems were complete and on the plane. So it was time to paint. I airbrushed grey primer on the bomber:
Remembering that this project was a test bed of things I had never done, one of the things on my list of things to try was bare-metal painting. So I masked off my bomber and air-brushed it in Vallejo Metals matt-aluminum. Also, if I scratched it putting the final touches on it, bare metal would be what would show through, a win-win for me. Here is that:
I had not done black-basing and thought: “I’ll try that!” I sprayed the bomber black (over the silver) and then tried to airbrush little white bubbles inside my panels as is required. I quickly realized that my slightly shaky hands (I’m 73 after all) and my lack of years of practice with an airbrush was causing the white to cover the panel lines and threatened to ruin the effect I was looking for. I had some one-eighth of an inch masking tape and covered the panel lines with this tape. It really worked well and I recommend it to any older person to cover the black of the panel lines. Then I sprayed the white blobs at will without worrying about the panel lines. Here is the bomber with tape:
Here is the bomber with the tape removed:
For the actual bomber colors I used a four color box of US colors from AK OD, Grey, Green and Desert Sand. I used all three. I used the grey on the bomber bottom:
I used several light coats until the plane was covered but the panel line black still showed through. You can see that hear. I also masked off the grey and airbrushed the flap bays matt aluminum:
I then masked off the grey completely and then airbrushed AK OD on the upper parts of the bomber:
This is the result:
In this photo you can see the dark panel lines showing through:
My bomber, “Knock-Out Dropper,” like many B-17’s, had the de-icer boots removed leaving the aluminum skin show through (a lot of these boots would lose adhesion and flap in the wind or break lose and strike the tail surfaces) so I had to mask these off and paint them matt aluminum. You can see that here:
“Knock-Out Dropper” was the first 8th AF bomber to fly 50 missions so it was no spring chicken. The sun had faded the paint, especially the tops of the ailerons and tail surfaces which were cloth. I added some of the AK Desert Sand to the OD and painted the surfaces in question the resulting faded OD:
On “Knock-Out Dropper” there are some hand-painted camouflage patterns in medium green as there were on other bombers, such as “Memphis Belle!” I used the AK Medium Green that came in the four color box of US colors but had to hand paint these on. I didn’t thin the paint enough and it is a little thick but here you can see the faded OD vertical stabilizer with the medium green camouflage painted on and the matt aluminum de-icer boot:
As I said, this bomber had been in combat, the paint was faded. I had never done any weathering as the “fresh from the factory look” was still popular in 1969 so I thought I would try my hand with that. My approach was really simple. I had the remaining color, desert sand, from the AK four pack so I thin it down and misted the bomber with my airbrush, spraying more layers on the top than the bottom. I put down a base of Tamiya smoke as a base for oil and exhaust streaks and then used AK Oil to spray from the engines backwards along the wing and then AK Exhaust from the engine exhausts backwards along the wing. For a first attempt it wasn’t too bad:
I used Zotz B-17 decals for Knock-Out Dropper and had a couple of them “shatter” and segment into pieces, so I was forced to buy another set. This may have been my fault as the decals back in the day were much thicker but you might want to think about this when buying decals. I added the doors to the bomber. I drilled a tiny hole where the door was supposed to go with my pin vise, big enough to hold the eyepins, drilled a hole in the door, put a small piece of eyepin in the door and insert it into the fuselage. This worked perfectly. I used the True-Detail set of B-17 doors:
Here they are in place:
I attached the bottom flaps:
I painted the frames of the top turret and ball turret canopies and installed them in the bomber using the original Monogram mounts (they were really ingenious and allowed you to put the turrets in after painting). It was really hard to see the faint window markings on those canopies so I did it old school; I put masking tape on the canopy, went over the tape with a lead pencil and then cut the resulting pencil line:
The turrets when installed looked like this:
I added tires. There was a “flat tire” showing the weight of the bomber on the tire, in resin, in a box of spare parts I bought on ebay. I had only one so I made a resin copy of the one I had, weathered it a bit and added those and the push rods to the landing gear.
I didn’t like the kit pitot tubes; they didn’t look like tubes and there was no attachment point other than a slight depression. I imagined these constantly falling off. So, I went back to my eyepins and brass tubes and constructed my own:
The only thing left was the antennae wires. Using the eyepins again for wire attachment points, I used vinyl thread to make the dorsal antenna:
And the ventral antennae:
