The Little World

As soon as I asked Google to show me B-17’s in Canada I got all the old RCAF pictures I had already seen, plus lots of USAAF shots. And then down at the bottom of a long search something new started to pop up. The civilian B-17. A few had been converted to private planes or South American specials and then in the 1960’s and 1970’s they started to be converted to air tankers for fighting forest fires.

I digress here and use the older term – ” wildfire ” is the modern terminology or ” bushfire ” for blazes here in Australia. But as a kid it was always forest fire and we were in danger more than we knew at the time. I lived in Alberta and British Columbia during many fire seasons and saw a number of them being fought by the older means. The advent of the water bomber and laterally the slurry bomber has made a great deal of difference to the success rate.

There were a number of B-17’s used in California and Montana during this period and I selected one particular picture as a basis for my conversion. There are probably special kits that will do this but I decided to use what I had – and I had balsa block. So I roughly measured the underside of the Boeing and profiled out a tank with my hobby bandsaw. It was smoothed, glued on with Araldite, and then faired in with Vallejo and Perfect Plastic putties. I decided to give the plane a bigger tank than those on the Google picture.

I did become suspicious and made sure the landing gear would raise the tank enough above the tarmac to permit taxiing. Must say the B-17 gear in this model is poorly anchored to the inside of the wing compared to the Airfix example. The Topeka tail cabin in clear will paint up well to match the modern aircraft, and trimming the .50’s off will make it simple to add a slurry hose fitting for filling the tank – that’s how they did it in reality.

The markings of the slurry planes were very simple numbering and civilian lettering. I can do it with leftover decals. The basic scheme is bright indeed in silver, white and bright red. The slurry paints the underside of the aircraft red in any case. I think I may also try my hand at engine exhaust stains and discoloured wing panels as there are several good colour pictures of these.

I fully confess to being a jackdaw – easily lured away by shiny objects.