The Little World

Or the shelf, as it happened.

I made a safari through the 1:72 jungle at my local hobby shop and this Academy B-29 was lurking at the bottom of the new pile. I am wise enough to know when a model will be popular and not hang round – so I grabbed it with glee and bore it home.

There were no real plans for a B-29 in the Air World List, but now that it is here I can see it was needed. In the case of this kit I am given the option of building it as a an air tanker from the 1940s that was used to haul gasoline over the Himalayas from India to China to support the B-29 campaign against Japan. The modification is simple as it involves leaving out some of the guns and fairing the turret positions over with curved covers. These are provided in the kit so it can really be built out of the box.

I note that at some stage of the game Hasegawa also boxed this as an In-flight re-fuelling plane. There is a flying boom assembly and an operator’s window. This is yet another rabbit hole that will be explored on Google pictures before the kit is started.

No note in the instructions about weight for the nose of the ship. I’ll assume it is needed and keep an eye out for sutable location – the landing gear looks sturdy enough to support it, so I’m not worried. As it will be some form of tanker, the extensive supply of bombs and the internal bomb rack will be left in the spares boxes. The bay doors will be shut. I’m still going to build the entire rest of the interior, however, as I need to understand the actual structure.

Note a new idea that occurred to me as I started to illustrate the parts. Light grey against dark colours shows up well but sometimes is a little overpowering as an image. But if you prop sprue trees up against white backdrop paper you get confusing shadows that obscure the very detail I wish to show.

So this time I set up a series of straight pins on the white back of a piece of foam board and hung the sprue trees on that. They show well and I can reduce linear distortion by tilting the board to match the angle of the camera. Very pleased with this for the cost of 3 or 4 straight pins.

Note that the moulders decided to make a separate tail section that goes on an internal strut. Very wise as this will be a lot easier to keep straight in the cementation stage.

Piffling amount of clear plexiglass on a B-29, isn’t there? And three of those pieces are marked as not needed.