Construction
The A380 hasn’t even taken to the skies yet and Revell Germany has a kit out. The Qatar Airways Decals were designed by Mr B17 Jeff Dick, and Huge thanks go out to Jeff! I am not content to use kit markings most of the time and Jeff has been a great Ally in many of my Airliner Projects. The Decals were printed on a Ricoh 3000 Colour Printer.
The kit is a monster! I made a few little modifications to the kit to help strengthen it up. Holes were drilled through the rear fuselage between the horizontal stabs to slide a brass rod through and into the stabs to add greater strength as the tabs are very small. I also used sheet styrene to brace between the slots inside the fuselage for the wings when it came time to fit them. I had trouble with the landing gear but I can’t blame the kit for sure, if I build one again I will take more time with the correct dihedral of the wing to make sure the wing mounted gear legs aren’t too long, I think I would even be tempted to make the outer gear legs telescopic so that I can adjust them after the wings are on. I left the winglets off until the kit was finished and attached them with white glue so that if they were knocked off they could easily be reattached.
Painting and Decaling
The kit decals are very nice, I used the kit supplied data and the window decals. When building the kit I was concerned about how to deal with the landing lights in the wings as they were a poor fit, as it turned out there were decals supplied so all I did was paint some circles with Tamiya Smoke and put the decals overtop of them. My notes tell me that I used Testors Enamel FS16440 Gloss Gull Grey for the upper fuselage colour. I actually have a little notebook that I occasionally fill out so that I can remember what colours I used.
Summary
Overall I am happy with the end result but since the outer main landing gear is very fragile from the modifications I had to make to shorten them it won’t do alot of travelling. A large workbench is required for the larger Aircraft Kits such as the BV222 and the Bear that are coming out these days
