1:100 Dassault "Mercure"

Some weeks ago I built and painted the 1:100 Avions Marcel Dassault "Mercure" passenger jet made by the German modelkit manufacturer Master Modell. I made a minireview about this kit some time ago

Building the model took a lot of efford. I had to use a huge amount of putty to hide some big seamlines followed by extensive sanding. This was the worst kit I ever constucted, the only good thing was that the plane would become a scenery piece that I could be a little sloppier than usual.

When it was finally built, the result was not attracting me. But anyway, I cleaned it from any dirt and residue, and gave it a coat of white primer, pretty thin but I thought the following white paint would cover the plane properly.

I almost gave up, first I messed up most of my white paint. Then, the first coats of (the now rare) white paint did not really start to cover the massive amount of putty which was used to fix all big gaps, but eventually the whole surface of the primed plane got its coat of white. The fact that my airbrush pistol was jamming the whole time did not rise the level of fun. 

What is mostly annoying to me, when I have to comletely clean the airbrush while I am in the process of painting, but I had to and after that I applied some glosscoat to prepare the Mercure for its decals.

I absolutely followed these intructions, they are a variation of the basic text which comes with all decals, but my mate Olli noted that I should take a closer look at this, and fact, the last sentence says "Do not apply at frost".
I was glad that I, even when did not know this, followed that advice.

The decals were, hmm, meh (?), the small decals were applied without any issues, while their medium sized counterparts did not stick to the surface. Everytime they seemed dry and sitting, a minimal touch moved them.

Then came the biggest decals, and, just look for yourself:

This thing not only stretched, before I even touched it, there are no holes for the windows. Since they are sunken in and the surface is not flat, the final look is horrible. Luckily this kit will be an absolute exception, I will stay mainly with groundvehicles.

Some parts of the thin red line of the decal just disappeared what almost crossed my red line. But I repainted them by hand just as the black front of the plane and a lot of the blue parts.

Finally it was sealed with matte varnish, sloppy but this kit will get its very final coat of sealing  when it serves its designation.

(Sure, a modeller with skills could make a nice model from this box, but not me, and I continued to work on this.)

The next step felt like some kind of liberation, I prepared all parts for building a nice scenery piece using them. At the next Montagsmaler meeting I will start to build this and I am going to try to include some LEDs.

What I did not mention in my closer look at this kit, was the fact that I got this kit twice for various reasons (I should not have done this) and the second kit was not even better to build, this text would fit on it too. In a future post the second Mercure will be shown, if that thing has not been flown into the wall right beside my workbench before.