Whilst I'm waiting for some parts to come for the Bf110G4, and as a change, I've made a start on the Classic Airframes Anson. There are no locating pins at all on this model so fitting the parts together will have to be done very precisely if any sort of accuracy is going to be achieved. The kit comes with a mixture of injection-moulded plastic parts - all fairly clean, some PE bits which are mostly for the cockpit area, and some resin. Some of the finer resin parts, such as the interior frame structure for the cockpit, are slightly warped - this may affect the finish - only time will tell.
I wasn't too sure about colour schemes of RAAF training aircraft, but this scheme from April 2008 Model Airplane International appeared suitable.
This was further reinforced when I received some aerial shots of 6 SFTS Mallala from the RAAF Museum at Cook Point in Victoria. There are several parked Ansons, the overwing stripes are clearly visible on them. The Anson will be modelled as R3518 which was certainly used by trainees while Rolly was there. Unfortunately, three weeks before "Wings Day" a course colleague, LAC Young was sent on a solo cross-country. He lost control of the Anson whilst flying in cloud and crashed, writing off the machine and killing himself.
This is the completed Anson, finished on 21 July. More photos at the end of this section.
Always the place to start for me. This is the first bit of resin, the port cockpit sidewall, superglued into place. Obvious from this shot is the comment about warped frame. Some work has been done on the cockpit floor including the spars and the aft bulkhead.
Various cockpit parts sprayed with interior green....
which then received the initial, subtle "dirtying" process. The as yet unpainted part lower right is the top frame, again warped though how much will be visible when the canopy is painted I'm not too sure about. All the seats have seatbelts provided with the PE but further painting is necessary first.
A general shot including the fuselage halves of "work in progress".
The completed seats with photo-etched seatbelts.
The cockpit control panel is photo-etched and very detailed. The throttle levers, mixture lever and flaps control lever, also PE have been superglued in position and the rudder pedals added. (The kit instructions are actually wrong, they tell you to position two control levers coming out of the oil pressure gauges.)
The different elements of what is quite a complex cockpit are starting to come together but I am increasingly concerned about the warp (seen here) in the horizontal top frame, so I've decided to make my own from styrene rod which I bought at the IPMS Nationals in Telford last year and which is luckily just the right diameter!
Here's the completed top frame with the starboard cockpit side. The two other items are the navigator's and radio operator's tables, all ready to be painted and detailed.
The Anson cockpit mask produced by Eduard has arrived - much careful reading is necessary before application!
I think I should have read the ordering instructions more carefully because when I came to apply the masks, I found I had the ones for the earlier, more sloping, cockpit!! Improvisation is the order of the day.
The main glass area is common to all Mk 1 Ansons, the forward part needed thinking about.
I sprayed the canopy with two thin coats of interior green, then shown here the top coat of dark green. This Anson, being R3518 and therefore ending with an even number, had the "A" camouflage pattern which is roughly the reverse of the normal ("B") pattern seen on most WW2 aircraft.
It seems to be ok! There's a slight bit of filling to be done at the top where the front section joins the aft - the clear plastic is very brittle and the aft section didn't cut off the sprues very cleanly. I'm pleased with the amount of interior detail visible though.
There's also a tiny bit of "tidying up" to be done with a very fine brush on some of the frames where the edges are a bit "flaky".
The canopy is in place and work started on making it a good fit. The turret was masked and has been sprayed but will not be finally installed until the very last thing.
I decided to take a break from all the detail work in the cockpit by looking at the wing assemblies. I knew from reading a magazine article by Brett Green that there was a potential difficulty with the position of the bulkhead in the nacelles which, if placed wrongly would affect the undercarriage.
On "reading" the instruction booklet I saw that there was an option to cut out the moulded ailerons and then to insert some separate ones provided, this I decided to do.
An upper wing half and some of the parts which comprise the engine nacelle and bulkheads, resting on Brett's magazine article which has proved more useful than the vague, and sometimes blatantly misleading, instruction booklet.
The resin nacelle fronts are supplied moulded to a thick base which needs careful removal with a razor saw, and then considerable work with a sharp knife, file and sand paper to get a smooth rounded front cowling, but see also below.
However, careful examination of a colour photograph from WW2 shows I believe that Brett hasn't opened up the front of the engine cowlings to a large enough diameter, see the following photographs:
This is Brett's beautifully finished Anson, but note the diameter of the cowling opening relative to the "bumps" on the outside, then compare it to.....
...the real thing where the diameter is not much smaller than the forward edges of the bumps in the cowling.
This shows the difference in the two, the one on the left opened to the correct diameter, the one on the right is too narrow.
The port wing lower with some of the parts comprising the engine and nacelle, the engine yet to be detailed.
The instructions do not give any warning about the orientation of the engine onto its mounting position. The cylinders have to line up with the bumps on the nacelle - if you get this wrong then the position of the exhausts through the holes in the cowling will be wrong and subsequently their "run" along the underside of the wheel.bay.
Having opened up the front of the cowlings, I decided to "show off" the Cheetah engines by fitting the pushrods ot the outside of the cylinders. The push rods were fine bits of stretched sprue superglued in place and then.......
.....trimmed to length once securely fixed. Other engine parts have also been fitted ready for painting and installing on the wings, see below under "Painting" sub-section
One of the other options is to add landing lights in the port wing. My first reaction was not to, but then I remembered in my research the ORBs for 6 SFTS recorded that they did searchlight patrols over Adelaide, so on the assumption that some night flying was done, I cut the apertures for the landing lights.
There are four small circular windows to add to the nose of the Anson, two on the upper side, two underneath. The positions of the windows were shown on the plastic but I had to drill them out to size before fitting. With a diameter of only 2mm for the smaller ones, it was fiddly work and I was concerned about getting them in accurately and of losing them.
I came up with a method that seems to have worked. Firstly I drilled the holes and opened them out with a sharp knife and file. At this stage I also thinned the plastic from inside the fuselage around the window aperture. Then I cut the windows off the sprue and cleaned them up.
Once satisfied, I put some Blutak on the inside of the fuselage, pushing it gently up through the hole but not to the surface.
I carefully positioned the windows; small adjustments to get them flush with the surface can be made by pushing upwards through the Blutak, (its "stickiness" stops the window from springing out), or by pressing down with a wooden cocktail stick. Once positioned I ran some liquid cement around the edge.
The Anson was the first aircraft in RAF service with a retractable undercarriage, which was a fairly simple affair though it did cause problems, the first being to the poor unfortunate passenger whose task it was to wind the wheels up with 144 or so turns of a handle inside the aircraft, and the second being that many pilots forgot to lower the undercarriage before landing!
The model undercarriage though is not so straightforward. It comprises a plastic injection-moulded "H" frame, (the main struts) and resin "beams" which extend to the rear of the wheel bay. Both of these items required extensive trimming and cleaning up. The fit of the stub axles into the centre of the wheels also required a lot of careful trimming. The main struts just butt onto a surface in the lower nacelle/forward wheel bay area though I was very sceptical about how strong this woud be. I decided after a bit of test fitting to make some plasticard supports through which the struts would be placed. The picture shows this on a test fit.
This shot of the completed undercarriage shows the additional plasticard support in place and the surface onto which the struts butt. The whole assembly is now very strong. The curved "beam" is simply glued onto the lower part of the main struts though there are no locating pins nor clear directions about this!
And whilst we're talking poor instructions - the two rear windows in the fuselage are a very precise fit, but they have to be fitted from inside the model, not from the outside as the picture instructions suggest!
The turret is a mini-kit in itself. The machine gun had three parts (four in my case because I snapped off the barrel forward of the magazine!). There are nine parts that make up these three items, there are two glazed sections also.
Most of the sub-assemblies are nearing completion so time to start fitting some of them together, starting with the fuselage.
First to be added was the starboard resin side panel, making sure that it all lined up - this was easier than I thought it might be. Next the scratch-built top frame was added, followed by the pilot's seat and control column. Once this was all set, a test fit of the starboard fuselage half showed that some thinning of the resin side wall was necessary.
Then holding my breath and with lots of masking tape to hand, I fitted the starboard fuselage half in place. It's starting to look like an Anson now. There'll be a few minor areas to touch up but I think it's ok so far.
It needs, inevitably, a bit of cleaning up and slight filling, but overall it's a clean fit. The turret and its surround is only placed there as a trial fit, that area needs much more work.
This is the same photo from further up the page but I've repeated it for the next two shots....
....adding the tailplanes. I tried this once before in the build but when I checked them they were "droopy" so I whipped them off! This time I carefully drilled a hole through from side to side and superglued a cocktail stick in place. Then I packed the hollow tailplanes with Milliput filler and finally glued the tailplanes to the fuselage, followed soon after by...
...the wings, which were an excellent fit. "Faithful Annie" is coming on.
I was unsure whether to apply a primer to the Anson, but in the end I decided against it. Using "trainer yellow" thinned acrylic paint, I sprayed a few coats on the undersides, having first masked off the undercarriage, landing light and canopy.
Preliminary coats of yellow were also applied across the wing areas and around the tail. I'm planning to pre-shade the Anson so the next stage will be adding the rough dark areas which will help to bring out some of the "daily workhorse" qualities about the plane.
This shows the underside with movable surfaces and panel edges sprayed with a dark grey which will then be oversprayed with a thinned yellow, leaving some of the darkened areas to show through.
This picture unfortunately doesn't show the subtlety of the pre-shading.
The next stage is a complete upper surface overspray of dark earth, which will be followed by the camouflage pattern of dark green. The Anson is masked ready for pre-shading prior to the dark earth spray.
And here it is. It sprayed up beautifully, helped by a tip that I read on a modelling forum, adding a "secret" ingredient to the acrylic paint, namely............
...artists' Flow Enhancer from my local art shop. One of the difficulties with acrylics is that they dry very quickly, and if brush painting it's impossible not to leave brush strokes. In an airbrush, acrylics can cause clogging or uneven spraying, but a drop or two of this added to the paint, plus a little thinners led to a very smooth, trouble free session and an excellent finish.
Masking the cowlings and engines was quite a time-consuming and fiddly business....
....but it was worth it when (nearly) completed, the dark green camouflage has to be put on as well.
It seems like the groundcrew have been waiting patiently!!
Much masking has been done on the wings and forward fuselage using paper cut-outs and Blu-tak, then the dark green was sprayed over the top of the dark earth. The masking tape on the wings has been removed showing the yellow training stripes. The aft fuselage section will be next before the whole aircraft is weathered.
The aft end of the plane is masked ready for spraying with dark green.
And once the paper and tape were removed, this is how she looks! Not too bad, several small bits that need tidying up, one or two areas that I missed in the masking process, but generally speaking she's looking OK.
I haven't glued the tailwheel in yet because of my fear of knocking it off during this stage where lots of handling is taking place, so the plane hasn't quite the right "sit" or "attitude" at the moment. That the rudder balance has survived this long is a minor miracle.
I ordered several sets of decals from Hannants for the Anson, Wellington and Lancaster. I put four coats of Klear on the Anson to create a smooth shiny surface. The roundels on the wings and fuselage are by Aeromaster. I used a soft brush to paint Microset solution on the wings to make the application of the decals troublefree. The wing roundels went on beautifully with no trace of silvering around the edges, moulding themselves to the "fabric" surface very well.
The fuselage roundel is a non-standard size which appears fairly common amongst Ansons in Australia and New Zealand. After the decals had dried for half an hour or so, I put a coating of Microsol on them to really "bed" them down and create the painted on look.
The model now has the right "sit" of an Anson.
The decalling was finished this morning with the underwing decals, the paint having received the four coats of Klear.
The next job was to start weathering this shiny, pristine Anson! I'm sure the planes at Mallala received lots of use and probably showed this in their appearance. I had already done a bit of pre-shading but I decided the main weathering was going to be with Pro-Modeller's "Weathering Washes", a clay-based solution which is painted onto a, preferably, shiny surface, allowed to dry and then wiped off. The extent to which you wipe off the wash will dictate how weathered the plane will look. I used a mixture of light and dark dirt for this wash, here it is drying on the starboard wing......
....and after a wipe off with a dry section of kitchen towel, I have started to achieve the look that I'm after. Subtlety is the watch-word with weathering, it can easily be overdone.
I wasn't too sure about colour schemes of RAAF training aircraft, but this scheme from April 2008 Model Airplane International appeared suitable.
This was further reinforced when I received some aerial shots of 6 SFTS Mallala from the RAAF Museum at Cook Point in Victoria. There are several parked Ansons, the overwing stripes are clearly visible on them. The Anson will be modelled as R3518 which was certainly used by trainees while Rolly was there. Unfortunately, three weeks before "Wings Day" a course colleague, LAC Young was sent on a solo cross-country. He lost control of the Anson whilst flying in cloud and crashed, writing off the machine and killing himself.
This is the completed Anson, finished on 21 July. More photos at the end of this section.
Always the place to start for me. This is the first bit of resin, the port cockpit sidewall, superglued into place. Obvious from this shot is the comment about warped frame. Some work has been done on the cockpit floor including the spars and the aft bulkhead.
Various cockpit parts sprayed with interior green....
which then received the initial, subtle "dirtying" process. The as yet unpainted part lower right is the top frame, again warped though how much will be visible when the canopy is painted I'm not too sure about. All the seats have seatbelts provided with the PE but further painting is necessary first.
A general shot including the fuselage halves of "work in progress".
The completed seats with photo-etched seatbelts.
The cockpit control panel is photo-etched and very detailed. The throttle levers, mixture lever and flaps control lever, also PE have been superglued in position and the rudder pedals added. (The kit instructions are actually wrong, they tell you to position two control levers coming out of the oil pressure gauges.)
The different elements of what is quite a complex cockpit are starting to come together but I am increasingly concerned about the warp (seen here) in the horizontal top frame, so I've decided to make my own from styrene rod which I bought at the IPMS Nationals in Telford last year and which is luckily just the right diameter!
Here's the completed top frame with the starboard cockpit side. The two other items are the navigator's and radio operator's tables, all ready to be painted and detailed.
The Anson cockpit mask produced by Eduard has arrived - much careful reading is necessary before application!
The main glass area is common to all Mk 1 Ansons, the forward part needed thinking about.
I sprayed the canopy with two thin coats of interior green, then shown here the top coat of dark green. This Anson, being R3518 and therefore ending with an even number, had the "A" camouflage pattern which is roughly the reverse of the normal ("B") pattern seen on most WW2 aircraft.
It seems to be ok! There's a slight bit of filling to be done at the top where the front section joins the aft - the clear plastic is very brittle and the aft section didn't cut off the sprues very cleanly. I'm pleased with the amount of interior detail visible though.
There's also a tiny bit of "tidying up" to be done with a very fine brush on some of the frames where the edges are a bit "flaky".
The canopy is in place and work started on making it a good fit. The turret was masked and has been sprayed but will not be finally installed until the very last thing.
On "reading" the instruction booklet I saw that there was an option to cut out the moulded ailerons and then to insert some separate ones provided, this I decided to do.
An upper wing half and some of the parts which comprise the engine nacelle and bulkheads, resting on Brett's magazine article which has proved more useful than the vague, and sometimes blatantly misleading, instruction booklet.
The resin nacelle fronts are supplied moulded to a thick base which needs careful removal with a razor saw, and then considerable work with a sharp knife, file and sand paper to get a smooth rounded front cowling, but see also below.
This is Brett's beautifully finished Anson, but note the diameter of the cowling opening relative to the "bumps" on the outside, then compare it to.....
...the real thing where the diameter is not much smaller than the forward edges of the bumps in the cowling.
This shows the difference in the two, the one on the left opened to the correct diameter, the one on the right is too narrow.
The port wing lower with some of the parts comprising the engine and nacelle, the engine yet to be detailed.
The instructions do not give any warning about the orientation of the engine onto its mounting position. The cylinders have to line up with the bumps on the nacelle - if you get this wrong then the position of the exhausts through the holes in the cowling will be wrong and subsequently their "run" along the underside of the wheel.bay.
Having opened up the front of the cowlings, I decided to "show off" the Cheetah engines by fitting the pushrods ot the outside of the cylinders. The push rods were fine bits of stretched sprue superglued in place and then.......
.....trimmed to length once securely fixed. Other engine parts have also been fitted ready for painting and installing on the wings, see below under "Painting" sub-section
One of the other options is to add landing lights in the port wing. My first reaction was not to, but then I remembered in my research the ORBs for 6 SFTS recorded that they did searchlight patrols over Adelaide, so on the assumption that some night flying was done, I cut the apertures for the landing lights.
I came up with a method that seems to have worked. Firstly I drilled the holes and opened them out with a sharp knife and file. At this stage I also thinned the plastic from inside the fuselage around the window aperture. Then I cut the windows off the sprue and cleaned them up.
Once satisfied, I put some Blutak on the inside of the fuselage, pushing it gently up through the hole but not to the surface.
I carefully positioned the windows; small adjustments to get them flush with the surface can be made by pushing upwards through the Blutak, (its "stickiness" stops the window from springing out), or by pressing down with a wooden cocktail stick. Once positioned I ran some liquid cement around the edge.
The model undercarriage though is not so straightforward. It comprises a plastic injection-moulded "H" frame, (the main struts) and resin "beams" which extend to the rear of the wheel bay. Both of these items required extensive trimming and cleaning up. The fit of the stub axles into the centre of the wheels also required a lot of careful trimming. The main struts just butt onto a surface in the lower nacelle/forward wheel bay area though I was very sceptical about how strong this woud be. I decided after a bit of test fitting to make some plasticard supports through which the struts would be placed. The picture shows this on a test fit. 
This shot of the completed undercarriage shows the additional plasticard support in place and the surface onto which the struts butt. The whole assembly is now very strong. The curved "beam" is simply glued onto the lower part of the main struts though there are no locating pins nor clear directions about this!
And whilst we're talking poor instructions - the two rear windows in the fuselage are a very precise fit, but they have to be fitted from inside the model, not from the outside as the picture instructions suggest! 
The turret is a mini-kit in itself. The machine gun had three parts (four in my case because I snapped off the barrel forward of the magazine!). There are nine parts that make up these three items, there are two glazed sections also.
First to be added was the starboard resin side panel, making sure that it all lined up - this was easier than I thought it might be. Next the scratch-built top frame was added, followed by the pilot's seat and control column. Once this was all set, a test fit of the starboard fuselage half showed that some thinning of the resin side wall was necessary.
Then holding my breath and with lots of masking tape to hand, I fitted the starboard fuselage half in place. It's starting to look like an Anson now. There'll be a few minor areas to touch up but I think it's ok so far.
It needs, inevitably, a bit of cleaning up and slight filling, but overall it's a clean fit. The turret and its surround is only placed there as a trial fit, that area needs much more work.
....adding the tailplanes. I tried this once before in the build but when I checked them they were "droopy" so I whipped them off! This time I carefully drilled a hole through from side to side and superglued a cocktail stick in place. Then I packed the hollow tailplanes with Milliput filler and finally glued the tailplanes to the fuselage, followed soon after by...
...the wings, which were an excellent fit. "Faithful Annie" is coming on.
I was unsure whether to apply a primer to the Anson, but in the end I decided against it. Using "trainer yellow" thinned acrylic paint, I sprayed a few coats on the undersides, having first masked off the undercarriage, landing light and canopy.
Preliminary coats of yellow were also applied across the wing areas and around the tail. I'm planning to pre-shade the Anson so the next stage will be adding the rough dark areas which will help to bring out some of the "daily workhorse" qualities about the plane.
This shows the underside with movable surfaces and panel edges sprayed with a dark grey which will then be oversprayed with a thinned yellow, leaving some of the darkened areas to show through.
This picture unfortunately doesn't show the subtlety of the pre-shading.
The next stage is a complete upper surface overspray of dark earth, which will be followed by the camouflage pattern of dark green. The Anson is masked ready for pre-shading prior to the dark earth spray.
And here it is. It sprayed up beautifully, helped by a tip that I read on a modelling forum, adding a "secret" ingredient to the acrylic paint, namely............
...artists' Flow Enhancer from my local art shop. One of the difficulties with acrylics is that they dry very quickly, and if brush painting it's impossible not to leave brush strokes. In an airbrush, acrylics can cause clogging or uneven spraying, but a drop or two of this added to the paint, plus a little thinners led to a very smooth, trouble free session and an excellent finish.
Masking the cowlings and engines was quite a time-consuming and fiddly business....
....but it was worth it when (nearly) completed, the dark green camouflage has to be put on as well.
It seems like the groundcrew have been waiting patiently!! 
Much masking has been done on the wings and forward fuselage using paper cut-outs and Blu-tak, then the dark green was sprayed over the top of the dark earth. The masking tape on the wings has been removed showing the yellow training stripes. The aft fuselage section will be next before the whole aircraft is weathered. 
The aft end of the plane is masked ready for spraying with dark green. 
And once the paper and tape were removed, this is how she looks! Not too bad, several small bits that need tidying up, one or two areas that I missed in the masking process, but generally speaking she's looking OK.
I haven't glued the tailwheel in yet because of my fear of knocking it off during this stage where lots of handling is taking place, so the plane hasn't quite the right "sit" or "attitude" at the moment. That the rudder balance has survived this long is a minor miracle.
I ordered several sets of decals from Hannants for the Anson, Wellington and Lancaster. I put four coats of Klear on the Anson to create a smooth shiny surface. The roundels on the wings and fuselage are by Aeromaster. I used a soft brush to paint Microset solution on the wings to make the application of the decals troublefree. The wing roundels went on beautifully with no trace of silvering around the edges, moulding themselves to the "fabric" surface very well.
The fuselage roundel is a non-standard size which appears fairly common amongst Ansons in Australia and New Zealand. After the decals had dried for half an hour or so, I put a coating of Microsol on them to really "bed" them down and create the painted on look.
The model now has the right "sit" of an Anson.
The decalling was finished this morning with the underwing decals, the paint having received the four coats of Klear.
The next job was to start weathering this shiny, pristine Anson! I'm sure the planes at Mallala received lots of use and probably showed this in their appearance. I had already done a bit of pre-shading but I decided the main weathering was going to be with Pro-Modeller's "Weathering Washes", a clay-based solution which is painted onto a, preferably, shiny surface, allowed to dry and then wiped off. The extent to which you wipe off the wash will dictate how weathered the plane will look. I used a mixture of light and dark dirt for this wash, here it is drying on the starboard wing......
....and after a wipe off with a dry section of kitchen towel, I have started to achieve the look that I'm after. Subtlety is the watch-word with weathering, it can easily be overdone.
