1/48 Hobbycraft Tutor

  by Dan McWilliams

--------------------

 

This is the very poor Hobbycraft Tutor, which gets improved vastly with the resin set from Uncle Bill's Hobby (made by Wayne Hui).  I owe Uncle Rick a vote of thanks for his help in showing me where to find the resin set on Wayne's site, which immediately sold me on it.  I used Belcher Bits decals and Alclad polished aluminum paint.  This model represents the aircraft I flew for 5 years, first as a student and then as an instructor at the Big 2 in Moose Jaw Saskatchewan (over 1,600 hours in this little sports car).  It was a joy to fly, and just challenging enough to teach everything a military jet pilot needed to learn before going on to operational aircraft.

Click on images below to see larger images

  

  

  

The Hobbycraft kit has very deep panel lines, but I didn't bother filling and rescribing, so they are too prominent.  I also didn't use the resin nose wheel well - it looked too daunting to do all that carving out in the fuselage, and I am not a super detailer.  The resin set really was worth it, though, in the cockpit area.  This is such an open-air cockpit that the kit parts would have looked terrible.  Note that some pics show the seats without the black in the hole where the shoulder straps come out.  Amazing how that little bit of colour makes such a difference in realism.

You'll notice that I used a black undercoat to set off the Alclad.  I'm fairly happy with the results of the paint, but Bare Metal Foil is still my preferred natural metal finish.  These aircraft were kept spotless; I didn't use any weathering.  Note that on the tail I had to hand-draw the silver outline for the Canadian flag - the decals omitted this important detail.  Enclosed is a pic of my late father's last flight in the military in 1984 - we flew together on that trip.  We were instructing at the Big 2 for 3 years at the same time, and flew often together.  He stepped out of the aircraft pretending to have a sore back from all my hard landings - always the joker!

Dan 

Click on images below to see larger images

  

  

  

  

Photos and text © by Dan McWilliams