1/144 Minicraft MD-82 airliner

Gallery Article by Carl Jarosz on May 1 2018

 

      

MD-82 "Midwest Express" Livery

Before you fellow military modelers start yawning and/or castigating me for taking valuable ARC space for such a basic kit as this one, I submit to you that building a direct, relatively undetailed airliner can serve to hone your modeling skills. I'll elaborate below.

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Now that I have your attention, let's start with the sprues of molded plastic, all in white, which works great for an airline livery that has white sections, like the fuselage and empennage (less paint to use, if one does a decent job of sanding and polishing the white affected areas).

Forget interior detail on any Minicraft 1/144 airline kit, or other manufacturer kit topics as well. They may have a point: why have multiple cockpit parts that cannot be appreciated on the finished model, except for some crazed modeling judge with a mini-light? Minicraft does, however, provide enough molded detail on exterior parts so as to be enhanced further, with paints and/or decals. Moreover, there are enough molded spots on the affected parts to aid the builder where smaller pieces get attached, such as the lower fuselage and engine pod shrakes. It would require at least one good photo of the aircraft to even begin to appreciate where the little fiddley pieces should reside without such aids.

The folded over instruction sheet is adequate to correctly build the model, but the sketches provided have a dated look that are somewhat reminiscent of the old Monogram assembly sheets with exploded collage of part drawings. What is rather nice, though, is the Minicraft provision of what each part is called! While us older modelers may scoff at such basic information, I prefer to think Minicraft may be trying to reach a newer generation to modeling, and one cannot have too much pertinent information to begin forming a hobby lexicon.

As mentioned in the beginning, don't pass off Minicraft's airliners as not being worthy of one's attention. Airliner liveries are meant to appeal to the public: who can't be drawn to fly in a colorful, high gloss airplane that proudly displays its name and monograms on the fuselage and elsewhere? To bring that about, the modeler needs to be able to: 1) mask nice, straight lines for color demarcation; 2) apply paint uniformly (not worrying as much about weathering effect and hues); 3) finally apply decals in long strips in a similar straight manner to reach the maximum effect. Often airline liveries have rather narrow colored cheat lines that are not attached to a larger decal. Getting these long, smaller-than-spaghetti width decals straight, without waves or taper, can be quite trying.

I used BMF (Bare Metal Foil) for the polished wing and horizontal leading edges. It seems as if nothing else comes as close to showing the high shine on those aircraft components. For what it's worth, not all airline aircraft had a polished leading edge on the vertical stabilizer; check references for the aircraft and time of its use.

I did have some reservation about this particular kit. It involved running lights and anti-collision flashing lights. I've grown used to seeing a recessed line or some indication where the running lights on each wing reside (red for port side; green for starboard). This kit lacked any such indication. I fortunately had reference materials to see how the running lights were designed, so I hand painted them in location. Additionally, virtually every aircraft has a ventral flashing red anti-collision light; many airline aircraft have a red dorsal light, too. These clear plastic pieces were not included in the kit; I made both out of scrap clear sprue, then used clear red acrylic paint, then glued them into place. Those reference photos were invaluable for the light locations on the fuselage (hint: the dorsal and ventral lights are not in line with each other!). I took a photograph of the underside of my model to accentuate the ventral light mentioned.

A final word about airline decals. It's often the case that the kit decals for an airliner are on the bland side; that one knows there was a brighter, bolder scheme once seen. Here's where after market decal sheets are worth their money. I used an after market set for Midwest Express that represented an MD-82 in the 1990s, shortly before it went out of business: it had more flair than the earlier based decals in the box. It should be obvious that one should not use the kit instruction sheet for decal placement as bible in this case.

Also, the livery updates by the owning company not only affected the markings on their planes, but the color and color demarkation as well. This will be reflected on the aftermarket decal sheet information. So it would be most beneficial to have the after market decal sheet on hand before painting the model.

Carl Jarosz

Photos and text © by Carl Jarosz