Canadian Airlines operates DC-10-30ER aircraft. This fact and the size of the completed model determined which kit I would use, the 1/200 Hasegawa DC-10-30. Right off the bat I had to be careful because Hasegawa makes more that one DC-10 kit. They offer a DC-10-40 kit which is identical except for the engines; the -30 uses GE fans while the -40 uses Pratt and Whitney. But Massimo, no one will see the engines. True, but on Pratt engines, the intake for the #2 engine is distinctly bulged, and since the recipient of this gift flew DC-10s, the difference would be noticeable. The model does not have a drag reduction kit installed on it, but only 1 in 100 people would ever notice so I wasn't worried about it.

The detail of the kit surprised me a bit. The panel lines are both raised and recessed. The raised lines in the fuselage I got rid of, and on other non-critical areas I left them alone. They weren't going to hurt the look, and they were in such a position that they wouldn't get partially sanded off. The little details on the kit rather pleased me. The air conditioning packs with their inlet and exhaust doors are there, as is the cabin outflow valve. The fuselage around the windows is properly thick, and even the fuel vent masts are included on the nacelles. I have a 1/144 Revel kit that doesn't include some of the this detail.

Construction was easy and straight forward. If you follow the instructions you can't go wrong. One thing this kit will not let you do a gear up model. The nose gear doors are molded as part of the fuselage, and the main gear doors will not close into the wells in the wings. A little bit of surgery, some sheet styrene, and these problems were quickly rectified. Oddly enough, though, the doors for the center gear are molded as one, so if you want the gear extended you have to split the doors to apply them. As for the stand, I stole it out of a 1/144 L1011 kit (the Modelcraft kit and don't get me started on that one).

I assembled the fuselage and mated it to the wings. The remaining sub-assemblies I build though did not attach them to the aircraft. I learnt this lesson the hard way a couple of times when trying to paint fully assemble airliners. Construction went well with the only gap occurring on the underside of the wing root, which I filled with gap filling CA glue. Now whether this was a kit defect or modeler defect I can't say, though the latter is most likely.

Painting was straight forward enough; light grey on top, dark blue on the bottom, Boeing grey on the horizontal stab, and silver on the wings. I used the AHS decal set, in which he gives instructions on how to mix the appropriate Canadian Airlines colors. The blue looked right (thanks Tom), but the grey seemed way too dark. The instructions call for one bottle of MM Gloss Gull Grey and 125 drops of insignia white. I chose to use Testors white (in the little square bottle) and what came out looked like battleship grey. In the end I used 11/2 bottles of white, which looks good on the plane, but oddly enough also looks a lot like Boeing grey. For the bare metal areas I primed with Testor silver paint, then applied a coat of MM buffing metalizer. For masking, I used various tapes, and for the first time I tried Parafilm M. The Parafilm was great for going around compound curves and over raised details that were to be two colors. This is a mask I am definitely using again.

Once I coated the decals with some liquid decal film, they went down easily, needing only a little Micro Sol to seat them into the recesses. I used my laser printer to make a decal of the pilot's name which went on the stand.

I'm very pleased with the way this model turned out. I learnt some new things along the way (Parafilm, metalizer) and was reminded of some of the basics. The final result is a good looking DC-10 (if I don't say so myself) which I'm sure will be appreciated by its new owner. It's just too bad I won't be able to enter it in the April contest. Though I built one, why not build another?