SK 61 Bulldog, Swedish Air Force - KP (the bulldog of doom)

Box art with a nice painting of an Army Bulldog above a typical hazy Swedish landscape. 

Painting instructions are provided on the bottom of the box - the splinter camo looks intriguing but in order to finish this project before the Sun turns into a red giant, I will just do the standard Swedish Air Force version (not presented in the box art above). 

One page instructions - 'tis definitely not a difficult assembly but I expect each part needing to be scraped, sanded and adjusted to fit. The color callouts need some own research as they pretty much just state basic colors such as "green", "brown" or "grey". 

Everything in once plastic bag. The transparencies have their separate bag inside. 

One fret with a handful of parts - that's all! Wow, this is going to be a very, very tiny model! Quite obviously a low pressure molding with plenty of flash everywhere. The propeller looks like a baseball bat. Well, not something that a few sessions with sanding sticks cannot remedy. Part 6 (the one missing just below and the the left of the propeller) was found inside the transparency bag. Quality control in action?  

Recessed panel lines, but not a lot of surface detail really. Some lines end prematurely before the edges of the parts and will need to be extended. The entire frame of the canopy is molded on the fuselage - I can definitely see why, as it would otherwise need to be an extemely thin part to hug the fuselage like this, but it also means that if you want to display the canopy open, you need to be prepared to do some serious plastic surgery. Personally, I won't bother. 

Flaps and ailerons should be possible to cut loose and reposition for some added interest if that's your cup of tea. The non-invasive removal of the molding gates will be a much more difficult task... 

The same for the elevators on the stabilizers too. You can also see the rather coarse and grainy molding here (although remember, this is an unforgiving macro shot). 

The molding on the smaller details is a bit rough and will need some careful cleaning up. The molding gates are really awful. Also the third seat in the rear of the cockpit is not provided (although it can even be seen in the front cover painting), and will need to be sourced from somewhere else. 

Canopy and side windows. A little bit warped, but so big, that most of the iinside details will still be clearly visible. If you want to modify the canopy to be posed open, you will need to separate the windscreen from the sliding hood. The two small side windows only vaguely resemble the apertures in the fuselage where they are supposed to fit. I am sure that will be tons of fun! 

As I mentioned before, the actual frames of the sliding canopy is molded on the fuselage. The front molding gate therefore needs to be handled with great care as it is not on the frame but protrudes from the bottom of the glass itself. Definitely needs to be removed with a super thin razor saw! 

A small decal sheet with some stencils provided. Some (but not all) of the dayglo fields are provided as red decals. The color is not quite right, so the fields are definitely best to be painted on using the decals as templates. I have done it once on my Saab Safir, so the same method should work here as well.  

Instruments and seat belts provided as decals. The decals are all a bit fuzzy and poorly printed, but since the canopy is closed, they should do just fine in this small scale. 

Ugh, that pixel pattern is just too bad. I might need to try to source some replacement decals from my spares stash. 

Starting with removing the wings from the sprue and cleaning up the edges. As you can see, the molding gates are pretty rough and careful sanding is required to smoothen things out.  

Some careful work with sanding sticks and things are already starting to look better. But the plastic is a bit soft and kind of stretchy, making it difficult to get an absolutely smooth and razor sharp result. 

The central console is cemented in place before tackling the seats. The Swedish Bulldogs were equipped with a third seat in the back, which is not provided in the kit. Some rummaging in the spares box came up with three decent seats (not sure from which kit), which after some filing and reshaping should look reasonable. Of course cushions need to be fabricated to make the seats sort of "ergonomically feasible", but that should be an easy task.  

Here are the finished seats with seat cushions fabricated from styrene strips. When painted and embellished with seat belts, they should look convincing, especially when seen through the thick canopy. 

Before going any further, let's tackle those tiny but intimidating side windows. Just as I thought, the fit is absolutely abysmal. They fit where they touch and just barely follow the curvature of the fuselage. The photo shows what it looks like out of the box: pretty discouraging. 

Half an hour of sanding and scraping sessions later, they were shoehorned into the fuselage apertures and were secured with a few careful applications of Tamiya Extra Thin cement and then strings of superglue applied with a metal wire. A word of advice, do not use acrylic adhesive, as the bond will be too weak and you might end up pushing in the windows into the cockpit during later handling! You have been warned! 

Cockpit assembled, painted with Tamiya acrylics and weathered with Tamiya Weathering pastels. I didn't want to spend too much time on this build, but at least I tried to add some detail with some styrene rods and bits to the cockpit side walls and the center console. The slightly oversized seatbelts are from Eduard PE set of generic seatbelts. The instrument panel is the kit's decals. 

Fuselage halves joined. The fit is slightly off and the fuselage has a tendency to bend sideways. Also the mating surfaces are a bit rounded, so there are some gaps that need to be filled. 

Filling the gaps with Tamiya White Putty. Filled joins sanded smooth, then new small gaps and pitmarks found, refilled and resanded. Quite a boring and arduous task, but time spent here will pay dividends later when it is time to prime the model. 

Wings attached. Again, the fit is pretty bad and some firm persuasion is required to hold the parts in place while the cement cures. And yes, some more filling and sanding is required. 

Stabilizer added, wing joins filled with dissolved putty and when dry, all fillings carefully polished smooth. A very dusty model needing a good cleanup under running water before continuing! 

Landing gears attached so I can test out the amount of required nose weight for the model to avoid sitting on its tail. Note the amount of Tamiya White Putty needed to completely hide the gaps, steps and some rough areas in the plastic.. 

All these fishing weights need to be glued into the engine compartment to make the model stand firmly on its all three wheels! I use acrylic glue for fixing lead weights inside a model. 

Okay, now it looks the way it should. Seriously folks, don't skimp on the nose weight with this model. All those weights just barely manage to pivot the model over to the front. 

The large canopy is cemented on with acrylic cement (Ammo Ultra Glue). The fit is quite good, but because of the frames being presented on the fuselage, the join faces are visible through the clear canopy, not hidden by the painted on frames as usual. I am not sure how it can be eliminated - probably not at all. 

I bought the Peewit precut masks for the kit, but they just do not fit. I don't know the reason, but the masks do not match the canopy even the slightest bit - we're talking at least one centimeter off here. I had no choice but to bin the masks and instead resort to mask off the transparencies with carefully adjusted slices of Tamiya masking tape. The horizontal dividing bars in the rear windows are missing from the transparent parts, but I plan to represent them with decals instead of trying to paint them. 

Primed with Stynylrez gray primer using my H&S Infinity airbrush, 0.4 mm needle at 28 PSI. 

A few minor rough areas had to be polished a bit and then resprayed, but that is kind of expected. 

Undersides sprayed with a mix of equal amounts of Tamiya XF-23 Light Blue and XF-19 Sky Grey, plus a few drops of X23 Clear Blue. Once done I then added a few drops of dark gray into the mix and carefully sprayed along the main panel lines for some subtle post-shading effect before generously flooding everything with pure Mr Color Leveling Thinner to melt the paint layers together. 

Undersides masked off using Tamiya masking tape. 

I wanted to recreate the sun-bleached paintwork that the SK 61's wore after a long time of service, where the blue areas turned into some kind of deep turquoise/teal and the green ones into murky brown. The right hue took quite a few attempts to get right, but I ended up using Tamiya XF-17 Sea Blue, Tamiya XF-23 Light Blue and some Tamiya XF-8 Blue, and then made a bit more greenish with some Ammo Mig-223 Soviet Turquoise. As always, thinned 50-50 with Mr Color Leveling Thinner. 

The blue sprayed on and then again soaked with Leveling Thinner. This trick really does wonders with Tamiya paints, it smoothens out the paint coat to a perfect satine sheen - or at least as smooth as the primer coat underneath.  

The green-brown areas were easier to reproduce. I mixed Tamiya XF-82 Olive Drab and XF-13 J.A Green and then made everything a bit more more brownish by adding XF-72 Brown into the mix.  

Camo pattern applied using Tamiya masking tape. Tape edges carefully pressed down with a cocktail stick before starting with the greenish brown parts. 

Green areas sprayed the same way as the blues. 

Masking tapes removed, revealing a rather faded and worn Swedish camouflage. Now let's give the paint some time to harden completely before tackling those tricky day-glo fields!