1/72 Mach-2 Falcon 20

by Geoff McDonell on Dec 15 2003

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The Canadian Armed Forces had used a small number of this sleek business jet for various roles in the 1970’s and while most of the fleet was painted in the all-white scheme with the national markings and lightning bolt cheat line, one aircraft, used by the Airborne Sensing Unit, was adorned with a striking gold and green paint scheme.  I had photos of this aircraft in my file, and a colour scheme and marking article in an old IPMS Canada RT Magazine, that had been burning a hole in my “must do” pile for the longest time.  When the Mach 2 kit of the Falcon 20 came out in the early 1990’s, I bought one immediately with this scheme in mind. 

I picked this kit up when it first arrived in North America, knowing it was a limited run injection molded kit and could disappear soon.  I was not blessed with the opportunity to see the guts of any of the other Mach 2 kit offerings at the time so when I opened the flattish soft pasteboard box, I didn’t really know what to expect.  At first glance, not too bad - recessed panel lines, choice of two engine nacelle types, all the basic parts are there, but on closer inspection…. 

The soft grey plastic had noticeable “flow patterns” with the depth of some of the flow marks rivaling some of the recessed panel lines.  The panel lines that were there were large, “muddy looking”, and some others were shallow and hardly visible.  The smaller parts such as landing gear legs and wheels were adorned with what I can only describe as “mold debris” – small bumps and lumps scattered over various spots.  The sprue gates were large and thick, and the trailing edges and general parts thicknesses were “clunky”.  It was not going to be an easy build up.  As a modeler who grew up on the Frog and Airfix line of models in the distant past, I could see that this kit would “need a little work”, but it didn’t seem to present any daunting challenges on first glance.  However, my early optimism would not go unpunished. 

The clear parts were almost un-usable.  The very thick clear fuselage windows were molded onto a thick plate with the windows standing proud, for insertion into the window openings in the fuselage halves.  Test fitting showed that the fuselage openings were different sizes, and the spacing of the windows on the thick plate did not match up very well to the window openings.  The windscreen was about 5mm thick and had bubbles trapped inside the plastic – that part was not going to be usable at all.  It wasn’t even molded with the distinct flat panes of glass that can be clearly seen on any photo of a Falcon 20. 

Upon cutting the major parts from the sprues, it became apparent that some of the parts’ sizes were not symmetrical, and the insides of the wing halves were adorned with large flow channels which would have to be shaved, gouged, and rasped off to allow the wings to mate with some semblance to the scale thickness they should have.  The fuselage halves actually touched together in some spots, which was a good sign, but there were mis-matches along the nose contours and the belly areas.  The rest of the main parts were reasonable looking “shapes” but would need some refining and cleaning up to insure they’d fit together.  All of the major parts, when test mated, showed differences in shape and outline between the respective mating halves by up to 4-5mm in some areas. 

The initial detailed review of the kit, as described above, caused me to shelve the model for the last twelve years until I built up the courage to tackle it this last year. 

The first step was to gather my reference material, decals and start planning the project (along with pumping up my courage).  I would need many photos of the aircraft, close-ups, walk-arounds and plans.  Luckily there is an ex-CAF Falcon 20 held by the British Columbia Institute of Technology out at their airport campus, of which I had been able to shoot some good photos during an open house some years ago.  I had most of the national markings, and the black-outlined white cheatlines were going to be relatively easy to make up from solid colour decal stock.  The “Airborne Sensing Unit” crest and the white outlined black “Canada” lettering for the fuselage were “oddballs” and nothing in my stash of Canadian Decals was available.  A check mailed off to Mike Grant Decals, with some dimensioned drawings and photos, were my solution to this little problem.  The Mike Grant decals were sharp enough to cut my eyeballs, and he was good enough to print the needed markings in multiples so I could have spares on hand “just in case”. 

The other challenges I had to work out were how to deal with the clear parts, how to replace the windscreen, and how to achieve the polished “chrome” look to the leading edges of the wings, tailplanes and the engine nacelle intakes.  The rest of the project was just going to be plain old elbow grease and “stick-to-it-ivness”. 

The fuselage windows were separated from their carrier plates and then I spent time trimming, filing and shaping all the fuselage window openings to match photos and plans, and to make them all symmetrical.  The individual clear windows were then Zap-A-Gapped into the openings so that the surface of the clear part stuck out proud of the fuselage, and the gap-filling glue filled in any spaces around the edges.  A number of evenings were then spent sanding down the clear parts and polishing them out flush with the fuselage halves.  The next step was to make a sheet plastic template of the window opening and scribe the “true” window outline onto the fuselage parts, lining up all the windows and insuring that I had a “cut-line” to use when masking the windows off later. 

I polished the inside surfaces of the windows, completed the cockpit assembly and painted the inside of the fuselage a dark gull grey colour.  Not much detail was going to be seen inside the model or the cockpit so I did not spend a lot of time fussing about inside there.  I painted parts of the clear windows on the inside to represent the consoles and equipment that could be seen in the photos of the actual Airborne Sensing Unit Falcon 20.  I added painted lead foil seat belts to the pilots’ seats and then added a good chunk of wadded up lead foil to the nose cavities to insure that the finished model would perch properly on it’s nose gear.

Click on images below to see larger images

The windscreen was more of a “project”.  The first step was to file and shape the flat panels to match the drawings and photos I was using for reference, and make sure the fuselage contours matched.  The shaped and polished windscreen was then used as a master to vacuform some copies using 0.020” (0.5mm) clear plastic.  One of the vacuformed windscreens was used from the two “good” copies I managed to get, which was trimmed and mated to the fuselage area with a lot of test-fitting and adjusting to insure a relatively flush fit.  The “good” copy of the windscreen was dipped in Future and set aside to dry. 

More evenings were spent cleaning up the mating faces and edges of all the major assemblies, filling in the flow marks found on almost all the parts, and generally “accurizing” the various bits and pieces.  Heavy mold seams had to be cleaned up, and locating pins and structural reinforcing pins and holes were drilled in the landing gear attachment points, engine nacelle mounts and vertical tail assembly base.  The bulk of the time was spent test fitting, shaping, filing, refining and otherwise cleaning up mating edges and connections for better fit. 

I also cleaned up all of the panel lines and control surface hinge points as best I could.  Many of the deeper panel lines could have been filled and rescribed, but by the time I was close to major assembly I was not willing to put out more time to do that.  At this point on the project I just wanted to get the damn thing together and painted, and maybe the coats of paint would refine the panel lines a bit. 

I spent a couple of evenings glueing the major parts together, fuselage halves, wing upper and lowers, vertical fin halves etc.  Then another few evenings cleaning up seams, refining trailing edges, and polishing the seams on the leading edges of the flying surfaces to accept some kind of “polished metal finish”.  Once all the “sub-models” were done, I assembled the major assemblies together to get a near finished model that was almost ready for painting.  The vacuformed windscreen was carefully fitted and glued into place with some minor filling and polishing required along the back window edges.  I used combinations of Zap-A-Gap and white glue to get a solid bond as well as to insure the edges were smooth and flush to the fuselage.  Fiddly bits such as the landing gear, wheels, and gear doors were set aside for painting separately. 

The next step before painting was to mask off all the clear bits.  I used Bare Metal foil for all the fuselage windows, strips of cut tape for the windscreen and the wingtip navigation lights.  I’d added coloured wingtip navigation lights using chips of clear red and clear blue toothbrush handles glued in place and polished out. 

The first colour to be sprayed on was the white for the wings and horizontal stabilizers.  I used Floquil’s Reefer White since it provides a nice dense white in a minimum of coats, dries hard as rock and has the only drawback that it is a flat finish, requiring an overcoat of gloss white or a clear gloss finish.  The dark green was then sprayed on through my trusty Badger 200 airbrush, first in light mist coats, then slowly built up to a solid green colour.  I’d masked off the upper gold areas on the fuselage and vertical tail using masking tape with the curved separation lines cut using French curve drafting guides.  I used a Humbrol Dark green gloss enamel from the tin, with a few drops of gloss black mixed in to get “eyeball close” to the colour based on the photos I was using for reference. 

I peeled off the masking and re-masked over the green and the white parts of the model in preparation for shooting on the gold paint.  I used Testor’s Gold enamel from the small square glass jars, thinned with lacquer thinner.  The gold was sprayed on in light mist coats, building up a solid colour after slowly adding coats with at least 10 minutes in between sprays to allow the gold paint to “set”.  The lacquer thinner allows the paint to dry fairly quickly and have a hard finish.  I’d been burned in the past using standard airbrush thinner for metallic paint and having extremely long drying/curing periods which still had a “soft” finish. 

Once the gold paint was dry, I peeled off all the masking with the exception of the masked clear parts.  I masked off the small areas that had a “buff” colour on the nose and tail and sprayed on a 50/50 mix of Humbrol Khaki and gold.  The areas that would require a polished metal finish were left alone at this stage, as I planned to finish those areas last with either Bare Metal Foil or some other method.

Time for decals.  The application of the decals to this model was reasonably straightforward, with the only time consuming step being measuring off and cutting the curved solid portions of black and white decal material to form the cheat lines.  To get a black-outlined white cheat line, first apply the solid black decal, then overlay that with white decal material that is cut slightly smaller than the black, leaving a thin black outline.  A circle template was used to create the forward fuselage roundel locations.  Where decals had to be applied to the flat white areas on the wings, I brushed on a patch of Future to create a gloss base for the decal.  I was planning to overcoat the whole model with Future later on, after the decals were all done, in order to seal in the decals and give the model that overall clean shine that the actual aircraft seemed to have. 

Once all the decals were done and dry, I sprayed on some Future to provide an overall gloss finish and seal the decals in.  I used the stuff straight from the bottle, no thinning, and cleaned up the airbrush afterwards with alcohol and hot water.  Once the Future overcoat was dry (that flat white sure sucks up the Future – took about 6-7 solid coats to get a gloss finish in the end), I polished out some of the “pebbly” areas with some fine polishing cloths (6000, 8000 and 12000 grit) to get a nice sharp finish. 

By now I was getting kind of excited, the model looked pretty good, very flashy colour scheme, a ton of work had been put into the project to get the basic model to this stage, and I was starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.  Murphy lives under my model desk, too.  When I peeled off the masking from the windscreen, it pulled out a section of the vacuformed part, creating  small jagged edges where the clear part had parted company with the nice gold paint edge.  Some of the filler had also chipped out.  A deep sigh was all I could manage.  I finished taking off the rest of the masking, and at least the starboard section of the windshield looked OK and stayed in place.  The solution to the separated edges of the windscreen was to try to mate the clear part back into the fuselage as best I could (it fit flush before, so why won’t it go back in now? *!#$%@&*).  I tried to blend in the newly re-attached section with white glue, but I was still left with a very visible seam line along the edge of the gold paint.  Some careful brush applied gold paint, followed by applications of gold coloured decal stripes to simulate the window framing, and it was going to be as good as it was going to get.  Oh, well, I can make sure to display the model with the starboard side facing out…. 

The final step for paint and finishing was to deal with the polished metal leading edges of the wings, stabilizers and engine nacelles.  About the time I was starting to think about how to deal with these areas, I was in at my friendly neighborhood Hobby Shop and the proprietor was showing me some of the Alclad II products, and the chrome finish that was able to be achieved by the Alclad II Chrome sprayed onto a gloss black base coat.   Hmmm, looked pretty good, and to my eye, looked more realistic than Bare Metal Foil, and would be a lot less messy than trying to do something with SNJ Polishing powder. 

More masking of the model was performed and I sprayed on some Tamiya Gloss Black acrylic paint to the areas where the polished metal needed to go.  A week later to insure the gloss black was totally dry and hard, and it was polished out with some 12000 grit cloth to insure a smooth surface.  I sprayed on the Alclad II product in light mist coats, building it up to a smooth solid finish.  It was dry within minutes and resulted in a near mirror finish.  Nice stuff. 

The wheels and landing gear parts were painted separately with Floquil’s Old Silver, given a wash with a brownish-grey watercolour paint and then assembled onto the model.  Some additional details such as the landing gear door struts were added from short lengths of wire, and the other fiddly bits such as pitot tubes and antennae were added to the model.  The wing fences were made from sections of 0.010” (0.25mm) sheet plastic and glued on after the wing leading edges were done, using thinned beads of white glue run into the mating edges.  (Sounds simple, but that consisted of about four evenings’ worth of cutting, sanding, shaping and test fitting to get a snug, flush fit….) 

Final detailing consisted of dark grey washes applied to some of the panel lines and control surfaces separation lines and picking out the airbrake panels in the upper wing surfaces.  The engine nacelles were given a slight amount of weathering to match what I could see on some of the photos of the CAF Falcon 20 fleet I’d been using as references.  Small blade antennae were added from cut and shaped sheet plastic and attached with Zap-A-Gap. 

Finally finished, I set the model onto a wood base for display purposes and started to think about the next project.  It was a grueling project, that Mach-2 kit, and I am trying to do some “straight out of the box” projects now as therapy.

Geoff

Click on images below to see larger images

Photos and text © by Geoff McDonell