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Gaining popularity world-wide, the Canadair
Challenger and it’s latest variants of the Regional Jet, has been neglected by
mainstream kit manufacturers and the only kit available is the limited run resin
kits made by Leading Edge Models of Calgary. The Canadian Armed Forces were one
of the early customers for the indigenous design in order to replace the fleet
of aging Convair Cosmopolitans and Dassault Falcons in the roles of utility and
fast transport aircraft. Part of the Challenger fleet was to be devoted to
personnel transport while others were modified for their role in electronic
warfare practices. The early all white colour scheme used for the aircraft lent
it the appearance of a civilian business jet, and later the fleet was painted in
the dull grey camouflage in keeping with it’s more military duties.
I saw the first releases of the Challenger by
Leading Edge in the early flimsy cardboard boxes at a local hobby store and
immediately bought one "for the shelves". Over the next year, two more
variants of the kits were released which found their way onto my shelves, by now
enclosed in sturdy corrugated cardboard boxes which protected the kit inside.
The basic kit is very complete and comes with a number of details including all
the small antenae and complete resin landing gear. In my opinion, the only fault
with the kits is the rather crude looking landing gear which requires a lot of
cleaning up to render them into realistic looking units. The rest of the kit
parts are crisply molded with fine recessed panel lines and good fit between
major assemblies. The molding of the cockpit glazing with part of the fuselage
works very well, but does require some care and attention to test fit and glue
in some edge supports to give the clear vacuformed piece some rigidity so it can
be blended in to the rest of the fuselage. All of the main sprues and parts are
also wrapped separately in bubble wrap plastic sleeves which help protect the
smaller fragile parts quite well. All of my kits were free from any breakage.
The decal sheets in the kits are very complete
and are of the typical Leading Edge quality. Being able to read the stencilling
in 1/72 scale is a "good thing" ! I was cajoled into building one of
the Challengers by a friend who was eager to see one built for a "build-up
review" exercise. I accepted the challenge and intended to build the kit
"straight from the box" in order to make it a fairly quick project (by
my standards!). I chose to build the CE-600 Challenger that was used by the
Canadian Armed Forces in the Gulf War as an electronic warfare aircraft, as it
had a rather unique history and was festooned with some interesting markings and
antennae. There wasn’t a need to do much more research, as the kit contained
some good reference photos and detail notes for all the different aspects of the
three markings choices contained in the box. I compared the overall dimensions
and basic outlines with dimensioned drawings in my files and found that the kit
was well within my tolerances for accuracy.
Assembly is straightforward, starting with the
cockpit which is molded as a large plug with the nose gear well and the whole
chunk acts as the nose weight. I painted the cockpit, seats and consoles the
appropriate colours and put it aside until I could assemble the fuselage halves.
The cut out paper instrument panels and consoles were quite convincing,
considering that you can’t see all that much through the windscreen panels
after everything is all buttoned up. The fine control wheels, cast in resin,
were very nice and needed only some minor cleaning up before painting them.
The fuselage halves were "block sanded"
on a flat surface to "true them up" and insure a good tight mating
edge. I also elected to glue in some locating strips along the upper and lower
inner edges to make sure nothing slipped as the glue was setting up. There is no
interior for the main cabin area as you can’t really see anything through the
small fuselage windows. I painted the interior of the fuselage Gunship Grey
(FS36118) to insure it was kept in the dark. I elected to not use the clear
resin windows provided in the kit, preferring to use MicroScale’s Krystal
Klear product after the final painting stage. I taped the fuselage halves
together and ran Zap-A-Gap along all the seams to bond the parts together.
Within a minute the fuselage was together and the cockpit assembly could be
fixed in place as well. It fits snugly and I made sure it was sealed in around
all the edges to prevent paint overspray and subsequent fogging of the inside of
the clear parts during the finishing stages.
Basic assembly followed quickly, with the one
piece wing requiring a bit of test fitting and trimming to get a tight fit. Next
came the tail and engine nacelles and only a small amount of filler was needed
in a couple spots to get smooth joints. Most of the time was spent on test
fitting and blending in the clear canopy part. I’d glued in a rail along the
mating edges of the fuselage to give the vacuformed part some support and used
5-Minute epoxy to glue this in to allow some set-up time and to fill the edges
for a smooth bond all around. I left this for a day to cure and it took the
better part of a couple of weeks of filling, painting, sanding and smoothing to
get a seamless blend of this clear part into the resin fuselage. Most of the
problem areas were in the front nose contouring and the joint at the top of the
fuselage. The clear vacuformed part is a different texture and is softer than
the resin and required great care to insure I didn’t sand down the resin or
the vacuformed material too much relative to each other. Whether this was a
fault of the kit or a fault of mine is hard to say – all I can say to those
who are going to build this kit is to take your time and test-fit and trim as
required to get a true fit to start with.
I sprayed some of the major assembly joints with
some grey primer to see how they looked and did some more sanding and polishing
on same areas around the engine intakes and wing roots to eliminate some
blemishes. The colour scheme was going to be pretty easy with blue-grey FS35237
over light grey FS36375, with some weathering noted. I cleaned up the landing
gear, which was fixed in place with 5-Minute epoxy for strong joints in order
that I could have the model sit on something while I painted it. The undersides
were sprayed first, using Testor’s Model Master enamel, and then allowed to
dry for a week. I masked off the lower fuselage demarcation line with some
strips of stiff file folder cardboard supported by small rolls of masking tape
to hold them proud of the surfaces to get a feathered edge effect. The model was
then placed on the landing gear legs and the upper surface colour was sprayed
using XtraColour gloss enamel. In hindsight, I think the upper surface grey
should have been lightened a lot more to represent the faded grey that can be
seen in the photos of the actual aircraft when it returned from the Gulf War.
The nose area was painted with a slightly darker gloss grey to match photos.
Decals went on fine, without any problems to
note, and it just took a lot of time and patience to get all those small
stencils and "zaps" in place. A week of evenings and I was ready for
the shot of Dullcote. I sprayed a liberal amount of Testor’s Dullcote through
my Badger 200 airbrush to get the near "dead flat" finish seen in the
photos of the actual aircraft. The gloss nose cone area was masked off to keep
it glossy as per photos of that particular Challenger. I popped out the paint
covered Krystal Kleer fuselage windows and replaced them with fresh clear dabs
of the white stuff, which were treated to a drop of Future after they dried. I
got out my chalk pastels and really went to town with the light grey shades to
pick out the different panel tones and shading seen in the photos. I used wet
Q-Tips to create "hard" edges along some of the shaded areas to
simulate the different fading of some of the surface panels. Bare Metal Foil was
applied to the leading edges of the wings, stabilizers and fin as well as the
engine intakes. The engine intakes presented a bit of a problem due to the sharp
compound curves, but when the sections of foil are burnished down with a hard
object, the seams and edges virtually disappear.
The last step was to apply a dark grey wash along
the control surface lines, and a soft lead technical pencil was used to
"draw" in some of the other panel lines that were visible in the
photos. The various small resin antennae were cleaned up and added with small
pinpoint dabs of Zap-A-Gap. I also added the static dissipater rods off the rear
of the flying surfaces from small lengths of stretched sprue. The only problem
area to note was the fit and alignment of the main wheels – it appears that
the main gear leg mold shifted as they were cast leading to a mis-alignment of
the axles. This wasn’t apparent until the main wheels were glued onto the
axles and only two out of the four wheels touched the ground. Easily fixed with
a sanding block to flatten out the wheels till they all touched the ground. The
purists may argue that the high pressure tires used on the Challenger wouldn’t
show the degree of flattening, but it was a quick fix for me. For those of you
planning to build this kit- be forewarned!
The relatively quick build-up of this kit will
appeal to many modellers, and while it is not a "shake and bake" style
of model, it is an easy resin kit to build and should not present any problems
to a novice modeller. Just check references and check the fit of things as you
go along. Now, where did I put that MOT Flight Services Challenger kit…?
Geoff
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