V-22 OSPREY             Italeri 1:72

After many years and much hand wringing this aircraft finally got put into service.

I picked up this Italeri 1:72 model at Hobby Lobby with a 40% off coupon. The model comes packed with 2 light gray sprues containing about 113 parts about 35 parts are really small and could probably get easily lost. First step I took was to wash them off with some soap detergent to get rid of the oil from the molds.

The flight deck contained about 10 pcs. The instrument panel was well molded with a lot of detail. Using a reference from Air Power International I followed the paint scheme from the photographs and not the guide in the instructions. The 2 seats were well defined with cushions and seat belts. The unusual thing about the flight deck is that it is flat black, away from the grays or chromates greens.

The cargo compartment was well detailed and was painted following the instruction, using FS36231 dark gull grey for the walls, the seat cushions were painted flat black and seat backs painted flat tan/leather as it had what was folded seats against the outer walls.  Of course this would all be hidden, unless the read cargo ramp was in the down position.

Now it was time to insert the finished flight deck/cargo compartment into one side of the fuselage. Some time was spent sanding the edges of the cargo deck to insure that when both haves were put together. Also some clear plastic potholes had to be secured inside the fuselage halves. It called or about 18 grams of weight in the front nose to insure it wouldn’t sit on its tail. I instead opted to put the weight just behind the forward bulkhead in the cargo compartment, but double up the weight to 36 grams to make sure it sat down correctly. At this point I worked on filling and sanding some of the seams before painting the fuselage. The front windscreen took some time masking the windows and the edges windows weren’t high enough to get good line cut. So I just several small pieces of tape working a little at a time to get the windows covered. Before attaching the windscreen to the fuselage I painted it flat black as that would be the interior color.

The engine nacelles came next, with each containing about ten parts. I assembled them and painted them with FS36375 Light Ghost Gray and FS36320 Dark Ghost Gray. The wings were pretty straight forward and painted them using the colors above. I applied black decals instead of painting the leading edges of the wings as per the instructions. The finished fuselage was painted the same colors. I painted all the assemblies separately to insure I got every thing painted and minimized the over spray if I had assembled the entire model.

The prop assemblies went together okay and then painted them using FS37038 Flat Black. Since most of the references I had showed the wing tips to be painted with RED/White stripes. The decal sheet included RED stripes and the instruction sheet showed that the wings tips were painted White and then the RED stripe was applied. Well I never had good luck with painting White, so I took the easy way out. I bought some Stars/Bars decals and cutoff the Red/White bars off the decal. I applied the decals to the top and bottom (or front/back) depending on whether of the props are in hover or forward position. HA.

Even though there were not a lot of decals it took about 2 hours to get them laid down.

The landing gear and struts, wheels looked a little flimsy to be sitting on the deck and per Charlie Scardon’s suggestion it might look better on a pylon. So I cut a hole in the rear cargo door and mounted a brass tube on the cargo deck. This was for the acrylic rod to have someplace to go. It worked just fine. I would say this took about 10 hours on and off to complete.