The sponsons are not cast on but are seperate pieces. This makes it much easier to leave them off. Using the sponsons as guide some plastic card is cut out to fill the gaps (0,5 mm at the sides, 0,8 mm at the bottom).
I deviated from the color recommendations of the instructions as the Cal Fire machines have a light grey interior with silvery grey cushions and red belts. The belts are a mix of scavenged PE parts and crafted ones.
Closing the fuselage was a bit of a challenge as I crammed as much lead granules into the very small space that is left in front of the instrument panel.
Canopy not glued yet. Wainting for internal and external masks and want to detail the office a bit more with some of the Eduard and Extratech PE sets I started using on the Academy kit. Still have to make up my mind weather to use the kits props or go for resin ones.
Masking set from Clear Prop. Quite a good price but some of the pieces did not detach easily from the backing paper as the cuts were not deep enough. That resulted in fibers protruding from the edges. Those had to be trimmed to get sharp edges. The set provides internal masks too. Here those are already removed again.
The canopy locking mechanism was scratch build. The edges were emphasised with a color pencil as I didn't want to risk a messed up window from drybrushing.
Only a detail, but some progress nevertheless. I opted against the provided decals for the prop tips and airbrushed them. A bit of a masking effort and not perfect, but good enough.
All them antennae cost me some time and effort. Luckily my spares box provided most items - or at least the starting point. Here finally the upper side.
A few more items to be installed later. The handles for the canopy took me a while to come up with a way to reproduce them. The kit doesn't provide any handles of any kind. I didn't like the PE parts either as they are way too thin. I tried to give them more volume but that didn't look good. I finally tapered a 0.7 mm brass rod in my electric hand drill gone lathe with a file and bend them. Now I think they are ok.
The Cal Fire machines appear speckless on all pictures, so I want to have a rather low contrast for the preshading. I chose H308. Let's see how this works.
Looking for a red that matches the decals. Draw Decal calls for Insignia Red, but the MRP-color with that name is far off (but looks good for my arctic Bell UH-1N 🙂 ). Placing those two red decals will be a challenge anyway as they need to be wrapped around the extended landing gear and a bunch of antennae. So maybe masking and airbrushing will even be easier in the end.
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6 June 2026, 14:42 -
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The California Fire Department uses quite a few Broncos as spotter and lead planes to detect fires and guide the water bombers to the spot. So my Bronco will be one of them.
Cal Fire operates OV-10A and D and did some modifications to them. Some have 3-blade props, some 4, some 5-blade ones. Antenna configuration seems to be very variable too. The main modification for the kit will be the omission of the weapon sponsons.
I will go for an earlier version of an OV-10A with a 3-blade prop.
Reset.
I started this project with Academys well known kit and pimped it with CMK and Eduard stuff with quite some effort - and the effect that the canopy would not fit anymore and the removal of the sponsons turned out to be rather elaborate. Thus to the shelf of shame it went.
Then came the ICM kit in scale 1/72 and I got one for a reasonable price. I checked it to estimate the effort for the conversion and it seemed managable. So, to the bin the Academy project went - not until I scavenged some still useful PE stuff. Let´s see how the ICM kit builds. I just had to start it.
