Designed to kill - converted to save: Cal Fire's North American Rockwell OV-10A Bronco
Comments
Michael Kohlthe locking mechanism of the canopy is quite a prominent feature of this bird. So I want to replicate it. The PE sets are only a rough guidance. Most will be scratched.
Michael KohlThanks Finn for your nice comment. Yes, actually I am thinking about placing the machine on a Californian airfield with a Bambi Bucket beside it and a (few) palette(s) of fire retardant in the rear. Building the Bambi Bucket is a challenge. Cross your fingers. 🙂
Michael KohlTook me a while to figure out the antenna layout of my Cal Fire plane. This differs significantly from what the kit provides. To make matters even more complicated it changed during the planes life cycle and is not the same for all the Cal Fire Broncos. But now I think I am not too far off with the setup I chose.
Michael KohlWelcome Alec and Robert. Nice to have you around and thanks for the motivating remarks.
Michael KohlWelcome Nicolas. Preshading unfortunately did not lead to the desired result. Let's see how it looks withe a coat of white on.
bughunterBeautiful livree and great work so far! As one can expect from your skillful hands 👍
And DRAWdecal, I used them on my Piper Cub recently. I found a comment about them: "uses UV-curing inks. The inks are fairly thick and very stiff, so your decal doesn't conform to curves very well without dynamite." 😉 Be careful!
Michael KohlThanks Frank for the hint. That will tip the scale even further towards masking and airbrushing.
I have to admit, that - as much as I like their subjects - I am rather disappointed by the decals themselfs. They lack crispness. Particularly the borders of black items such as Numbers or letters or lines are quite blurry. Areas of color are not evenly printed but have a grainy appearance. So for an endeavor that specialises in decals I was unpleasantly surprised when I inspected them.
bughunterYep, so I masked the bigger black parts of the marking. The small elements were ok, and the white was printed very bright on top.
littleblackbearI'm following this project closely! I have plans to build a Cal Fire Bronco in 1:48. I live close enough to MCC, their main base near Sacramento, and see them flying in and out regularly. Such a fascinating plane, and I'm doubly keen on their new role in helping fight wildfires.
Excellent work on this build. Stunning detail and I have so much respect for being able to do that at 1:72!
Album info
The California Fire Department uses quite a few Broncos as spotter and lead planes to detect fires and guide the water bombers to the spot. So my Bronco will be one of them.
Cal Fire operates OV-10A and D and did some modifications to them. Some have 3-blade props, some 4, some 5-blade ones. Antenna configuration seems to be very variable too. The main modification for the kit will be the omission of the weapon sponsons.
I will go for an earlier version of an OV-10A with a 3-blade prop.
Reset.
I started this project with Academys well known kit and pimped it with CMK and Eduard stuff with quite some effort - and the effect that the canopy would not fit anymore and the removal of the sponsons turned out to be rather elaborate. Thus to the shelf of shame it went.
Then came the ICM kit in scale 1/72 and I got one for a reasonable price. I checked it to estimate the effort for the conversion and it seemed managable. So, to the bin the Academy project went - not until I scavenged some still useful PE stuff. Let´s see how the ICM kit builds. I just had to start it.
