The third and final part of this magnificent scratch-build project from the skilful John Haas, the first and second parts to be found here and here. A three bay biplane is challenging enough in kit form (think Frog Vimy)...
'Dear readers, after building the main parts, I could turn my attention to all the tiny bits and pieces and in between, do some painting.
'First I painted all the struts black, thereafter the floats got their silver finish. As usual I left part of the fuselage unpainted so that I could handle the model without damaging the paint.
'Whilst the paint was drying, I kept myself busy with the construction of a beaching trolley and some wooden supports. The trolley is loosely based on several different examples which I found on photographs on the internet.
'I then paid some extra attention to the construction of a scarff-ring and the machine gun, I had some leftover kit parts, but they were rather bulky and not accurate, so with some stretched sprue I made the parts from scratch.
'So I arrived at applying the last details; the control horns and cables.
'Finally, what was left were the Hinomaru. They are big and I had no more left in my spare decal clippings box, so I had to print them with my PC printer on white decal paper.
'I would have liked, to include the nice Japanese logos and scripts on my model, but I had no luck finding a good example which I could use as a print pattern. And to paint them by hand . . . I only can manage the ' no step ' markings in Kana! :-)
'To conclude the build, I handpainted the red warning strips on the floats. With the large stringers on the floats a decal would not have worked here. Model finished!
'To summarise I had great fun building this model, although I knew that the floats and struts construction would be tricky - and sure it was! :-)
'And later I discovered the reason for the double wings truts, the outer wings could be folded backwards, so the inner wing needed extra support struts.'
