The Little World

And boys were boys…and kit manufacturers were not afraid to put silver colour into the plastic models. This old Airfix Shooting Star was in the $ 10 rack at the Sandown Park model show and as it was complete, I couldn’t resist. Even if it did not strike my main chord as a jet , it was too sweet to give up.

The sprues for the main parts are long gone, but the parts are there in full. Those were the days when Airfix knew their builders needed a little help in locating fuselage halves and made locating pins and sockets accordingly. You could build a bridge with some of them. I don’t mind at all.

Of course the silver finish was intended to make a non-painted model look good – and it does. Many of the 50’s and early 60’s kits were in this form of styrene. Some of it could be remarkably brittle – for instance some early US Revell – but Airfix always seemed to put more plasticizer in their mixture so you were more comfortable building it.

Well, this one is going to be interesting – there are several choices in fuel tanks and even a Korean War bomb load. But the decals are very yellowed, and may not recover enough to be used.

I am loathe to go buy a set of aftermarket ones that will be double the price of the kit, so if I cannot scrounge enough clean USAF stuff I’ll use up the Brazilian insignia that are going to go begging from a Douglas Havoc kit. Fortunately the Brazilians have several preserved examples of F 80’s and T 33’s so there are colour references.

The instructions are also a lovely shade of yellow.

Ah, well, at least the landing gear is pretty darn sturdy and if it needs nose weight I won’t worry about it bending over. It’s really a blast from the past.