FMA I Ae 38 "Naranjero" - Argentinian Flying Wing Cargo Plane - El Barón Rojo 1/72nd 3d-printed kit

 

 

Stranger things

My older son -himself a modeler- had the kindness* of gifting me a kit of a very beautiful, but ill-fated Argentinean cargo plane designed by Reimar Horten, of flying wings fame.

This four-engine, large-span wooden monster was built in Argentina with inadequate materials, primitive technology, and worst of all deficient power plants, thus condemning the project to failure from the start. It did fly, but never fulfilled its promise.

*Or was he surreptitiously punishing me for some parenthood mistakes, given the nature of the kit?

Strangely enough, there is another kit of the Naranjero, reputedly -given the horrid nature of the molds- made in Mordor by Unicraft. I saw it and run away like hell as fast as I could.

We are here, with this Argentinian "El Barón Rojo" (The Red Baron) kit, I believe slightly better off, but not completely off the hook. This is yet another example of 3D printing not reaching at all the basic quality of an injected kit, and falling quite below the minimum standards of surface and detail we now expect form even the simplest kit. Good for a toy, but not for a serious modeler. Although perhaps with some potential as a starting point?

Still, the 3D-printing kit industry may provide you with some things others won't, hence their place in the Modeling Universe. But you will have to make a LOT of concessions and allowances, and/or replace a number of parts, do quite a bit of scratchbuilding, and be prepared for surfaces more suitable to serve as sanding tools, given their roughness and abundance of ridges. My recent experience with a "VFR" kit discouraged my from building any crude 3D-printed kit, as the product is definitively lacking in all departments.

Still, I thought I would present to you this kit from a valiant manufacturer of Argentina, surely made with love and the best of intentions, whatever the kit shortcomings may be.

Would I build it? maybe, not sure at the moment. I have a plan, but in any case a long list of projects is in the pipeline as we speak that need completion.

I would need to replace the canopy with a vacuum-formed part made from a wood carved plug, the props, the landing gear, and all small details, and find a way to give those surfaces a realistic smooth finish. A lot of work. One good thing: the parts are molded hollowed, thus the main components are surprisingly light, unlike the solid extra-heavy bricks some resin manufacturers regale us with, that end up drooping, sagging, and destroying landing gears.

There is plenty of material on the Net about this plane, so I won't be parroting here what you can easily find by yourself.

Just a sample:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FMA_I.Ae_38

The shortcomings of low-res 3D-printing are evident in some of the parts:

All these may need replacement:

20 minutes with coarse wet and dry sanding paper mounted on a block under running water didn't do anything really significant to the very hard surface of the parts. In fact, the parts act themselves as a sanding tool, degrading the sanding paper, sanding stick and sanding block. Little excrescences that usually you nudge away with a couple touches of the X-acto or single-edge razor blade, required quite a bit of force to be dislodged:

Anything curved/diagonally situated gets the awful 3D-printing layering. Again, 5 minutes of sanding did nothing relevant:

Once more the layering:

And not even the mother of this prop blade would put it on a model!

 As I wanted to see if I could open the clamshell cargo doors at the fuselage end, I tried a thin saw I normally use in resin at the edge of an aileron, again coming to the conclusion that the material used to print the kit is too hard and unfriendly.

Unfortunately, what could have been a very challenging, but ultimately doable project, is starting to appear as a useless effort that after an inordinate amount of hours would just render a mediocre, toy-like model. I think that the modeling hours that your lifespan would grant you are better spent on a project that could reward you with a good replica. The ratio here between time and effort involved versus results, presents itself as absolutely miserable.

So we keep waiting for a good kit of the Naranjero, as the Unicraft kit leaves a lot to be desired, and yet another attempt in the form a "Los Huarpes" kit release of old doesn't seem to be any better either.

Still, some brave soul may attempt this one, perhaps slathering the surfaces with car body putty and then sanding. Not for me, I am afraid.

To be continued?