The Little World

Sometimes it’s hard to resist being a kid – particularly when you are in a hobby shop that also sells toys. You know you’re in there for a serious adult purpose ( like buying toy airplane kits ) but part of you is still a child and wants to buy toy airplanes…

I mean it wants to buy the ones that’re already made up in show boxes. The brightly coloured small scale ones. In the case of some of the offerings there are multiple versions of the same plane and sometimes the paint jobs can be spectacular. The excuse you make to yourself is that they are going to be background models and that they are quite inexpensive. $ 15 is about right for most fighter planes in this class of product.

There is a variant of this behaviour – the die-cast collector who will hang out for a Corgi, Matchbox, or Oxford miniature made largely of metal. The paint job may be a little more authentic and the details may be picked out a little better on the casting, but the downside is the price. These little suckers can run from $ 50 to $ 150. Serious adult behaviour returning to the situation and not the sort of thing that you pick up as an afterthought.

The heading image is a tabletop of three of these built-up plastic aircraft. The shapes are good and the colours might be authentic, but they are bound to be bright – that sells. Unfortunately they might be brighter or more distinctive than I want in my airfield collection. The P-39 Airacobra seen in the foreground is a prime example of this – it’s supposed to show a red tail to indicate a connection with the coloured pilots in the USAAF. Not my cup of  cultural tea, though I dearly love the P-39. So I decided to do something about the two examples I’d purchased.

The tails went first – Tamiya Olive Drab sprayed over the red.  Then the somewhat fanciful RAF Sky underside extended back to the tail. Then a masking job on the underside for one and a combination of Dark Earth and Olive Drab sprayed in my first freehand camouflage job. I was painting it as a USAAF fighter in Australia so the red edges to the roundels had to go – the toy markings came off with lacquer thinner and I could adapt some plain US stars. Fortunately I even had enough spare decals for a unit number, though nothing to spare for the tail. The final spray of Humbrol Satin Cote restored this toy to a model’s status and eventually it will be in the Australian section of Stein’s Air World.

The other ex-red tail merely needed to lose the red nose band as well and then take an overall Satin Cote. I debated removing the blue skull but left it and the unit number as being non-political. It will have to be reserved for the display of a USAAF base in England as the red-rimmed wing insignia had to stay.

Note that the pictures of this P-39 were taken with a new and inexpensive Chinese prime lens for my Fujifilm cameras. I’m delighted with it.