BPM 1/144th scale Auster AOP

 As I was looking at some later war European scenarios I realised that my Allied forces don't have any spotter planes! These were critical for artillery observation, and with total Allied air supremacy could roam the battlefield at will seeking out unfortunate Germans to shell. BPM do these in 1/144th scale resin. 

I ordered two of them as I wanted a British one and an American one. Although the Auster is British, it is based on the American L-2 so they are very similar.

They are nice single piece resin prints with very little flash, although like many BPM resin models, they have very obvious striations or contours  on the wings although these were easy enough to sand down as they were quite fine.

They both have the weird circular hole in the bottom of the fuselage, which I discovered on reading the blurb on the website is designed to take an earth magnet. 

And here they are in their final paint schemes. I've taken to undercoating planes in grey as the large expanses of monochrome colours look better on a lighter undercoat. I'm rather pleased that the OD on the L-2 looks slightly brownish in this shot, just like the real thing in photos!

And a rather dimmer picture in artificial light.

The US one is just in plain Olive Drab, a very variable shade of paint indeed as it is just black and ochre mixed together and it fades terribly. I mixed this up from VJ Russian Uniform and VJ Bronze Green. The first batch came out too dark so I had to re-paint it and you can see in this photo that it is actually a dark green, but it changes colour in different lights.

The wing decal is from Doms Decals, but I didn't have any small enough to put on the fuselage as this plane is tiny.

I did the underside in standard US 'Neutral Grey'. It looks a bit dark in this photo but is lighter in natural light. I couldn't actually find any guidance on how to paint the underside of US spotter planes, so I used the standard USAAF scheme for aircraft in tactical paint schemes (as opposed to those in silver finish). I didn't bother with a decal on the underside.

The British Auster is done in the familiar Dark Earth/Dark Green scheme with subdued wing roundels. Like the US plane, the fuselage was far too small to accommodate any of my yellow edged fuselage decals.

Now, although some Austers had their undersides done in black or eggshell, many of them seem to have been painted in the camouflage scheme on the underside too. I assume it is because they spent a lot of time banking at low altitude, so their undersides were exposed against a terrain background. Anyway, I thought it would make a change and did the underside in camo too although I didn't bother with roundels.

Did I mention that these are tiny planes? Here they are next to a rather moderate sized Hurricane for scale. I'm amazed they managed to pack two crewmen and a load of extra radio gear in them. 

Very pleased to have done those, I'm not sure why it took me so long.