Eduard 1/48 Westland Lysander (Special Duties In France): Part 4

By the end of my previous post in this build log, I’d managed to get the aeroplane mostly assembled and primed. The next task was an all-over coat of Tamiya gloss black (softened with a little white and blue), ready for decals and weathering. Once that was in place, I was able to add the engine cowling and slats.

Eduard 1/48 Lysander, black coat 1
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Eduard 1/48 Lysander, black coat 2
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The kit decal sheet provided pre-1942 roundels and flashes, appropriate for this aircraft, and I used a sheet of red 8″ RAF letters from Fantasy Printshop for the tail number.

Eduard 1/48 Lysander, decals 2
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Eduard 1/48 Lysander, decals 3
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Eduard 1/48 Lysander, decals 1
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I also added white rungs to the ladder—in the real aircraft these were painted for easy visibility in moonlight, as people scrambled in and out of the rear compartment during a frantic few minutes on the ground. You may also notice see the little scrawled “4” next to the ladder. In her marvellous memoir French Resistance In Sussex, Barbara Bertram recorded that the number of packages in the rear compartment was always marked in chalk on the side of the aircraft, to ensure that everything was unloaded.

Next, marking up the panel lines and adding a little light weathering and a few paint chips around the removable panelling. I used some LifeColor Liquid Pigment for this, switching from pale shades on the black paint to dark shades on the roundels and flashes.

After a coat of matt varnish I removed the paint masks and the two canopy sections I wanted to model as being open.

Eduard 1/48 Lysander, matt 2
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Eduard 1/48 Lysander, matt 3
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Eduard 1/48 Lysander, matt 1
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Then some small parts were put in place—the front cowling and exhaust, the message hook, and a radio aerial under the fuselage. Most Lysander III’s had a radio wire running from above the cockpit to the tail, directly above the rear compartment. This was omitted in the Special Duties Lysanders, presumably to avoid garotting passengers in the dark, and to allow this sort of thing to go on unimpeded:

Loading casualties into a SD Lysander, Italy 1945

Then the long-range fuel tank under the belly, which (judging from photographs) had a rather shinier finish than the fuselage.

The side window is easily modelled in the down position, since it slid down into the side of the fuselage. So I portrayed its upper edge with a styrene strip. The sliding overhead cockpit canopy is tricker, because it slid on rails to lie over the central part of the canopy, like this:

Lysander sliding canopy

The thick kit parts don’t fit snugly one on top of the other, so I resorted to a little visual cheating, sanding off the moulded frame of the cockpit section, and extending its edges downwards with a little styrene—I’d rather have the canopy a little oversized than teetering like a small hat on a large head. Here it is, with the rails attached:

Eduard 1/48 Lysander, revised canopy roof
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As a final touch, I added some luggage designed for O-gauge railway layouts, to portray those four items that needed to be unloaded.

So here’s the final product, as close as I can get to a Special Duties Lysander on the ground in a French field.

Eduard 1/48 Lysander, completed 1
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Eduard 1/48 Lysander, completed 2
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Eduard 1/48 Lysander, completed 3
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Eduard 1/48 Lysander, completed 4
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Eduard 1/48 Lysander, completed 5
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Eduard 1/48 Lysander, completed 6
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Eduard 1/48 Lysander, completed 7
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Eduard 1/48 Lysander, completed 8
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Eduard 1/48 Lysander, completed 9
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Eduard 1/48 Lysander, completed 10
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Eduard 1/48 Lysander, close up
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Eduard 1/48 Lysander, with Nesbitt-Dufort's book
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4 thoughts on “Eduard 1/48 Westland Lysander (Special Duties In France): Part 4”

  1. Ah! Doc! You forgot something!

    I read the whole article to get a hint on how *you* would go about weathering the model and then read it all again to see if I merely derped and missed it.

    Of interest because just a little of it got me a lot of compliments on my lead figurines at Battlemech tournaments back in the eighties.

  2. It’s there, but not in any great detail:
    “Next, marking up the panel lines and adding a little light weathering and a few paint chips around the removable panelling. I used some LifeColor Liquid Pigment for this, switching from pale shades on the black paint to dark shades on the roundels and flashes.”
    LifeColor Liquid Pigment is nice range of weathering products–settles nicely into panel lines, and comes with a remover solution that lets you lift off any excess.
    Tiny amounts of flat aluminium paint on a fine brush for the paint chips.

  3. What!? Purpose built weathering pigments?

    We live in wonderous times Doc.

    Back in my time we had to use the used thinner we cleaned our brushes with as a weathering pigment!

    (Worked pretty good too.)

    1. The folks who build model armoured vehicles even have little pots of coloured dust they can cake on in appropriate locations. I think getting the wrong colour of mud on your vehicle is considered something of a rookie error these days.

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