For your viewing
pleasure, here are some pictures of my 1/32 Revell Arado Ar-196A-3 that I've
recently built for a friend of mine.
This is a very good
kit with a small price tag, which is always a plus. The parts fit well and
the cockpit, engine and wing folding mechanism are nicely detailed out of the
box. The only gripe I have is about the canopy: Revell has, IMHO,
unnecessarily broken down the transparents in three parts that must be
carefully aligned and glued together to form the right shape. It's a
fiddly process, but the locating tabs on the fuselage help a lot. The
windshield comes out perfectly as the joints coincide with the frames, but
in the other parts of the "glasshouse" the joints are very
visible. Ah, I almost forgot the other (minor) gripe: the molded seat
harnesses. Take my advice and scrape them off first thing, even two
strips of Tamiya tape are better than those "things"!
I've built the model
without aftermarket parts, adding only scratchbuilt details in the cockpit and
in the engine compartment. I've also added the riggings for the floats
following the notes in Ted Taylor's article that you can find here on ARC,
worked like a charm! And, by the way, Ted's article is full of useful tips that
helped me along during the construction.
Click on
images below to see larger images
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I primed
the metallic parts of the plane with decanted Tamiya AS-12 Bare Metal Silver,
then I preshaded the model with flat black on the upper parts and dark brown on
the undersides. Then I painted the model with Humbrol enamels 243 and 244 (RLM72
and 73) and Gunze RLM65 on the undersides. A lightened version of the base
colors was sprayed on the panels' center and on the parts in relief on the doped
fabric sections to add some variations to the paintscheme.The AS-12 Bare Metal
Silver basecoat is tough as nails and allowed me to lightly scratch and scuff
the camo to create the wear and tear effects on the floats, fuselage and wings
leading edges. After having sprayed the Gunze RLM04 yellow ID markings and the
white fuselage band, I handbrushed a couple of coats of Pledge (Future) to
improve the adhesion of the decals, especially on the doped fabric parts which
have a slightly grainy texture. The decals are from the box except the
swastikas that come from the spares. A wash with black/dark brown oils, some
postshading with the same dark mixture and some staining here and there
basically ended the painting process. After having installed all the small
bits, a last protective coat of decanted Valleyo Acrylic Varnish (Satin on
metal sections and Matt on fabric areas) wrapped up my work.