Category: American aircraft
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Tail Feathers
I have always been curious about anything connected to the decoration of aircraft. Look out your picture book of WWII aircraft and turn to the RAF section. Note the insignia applied to the average fighter or bomber: a. Two upper wing roundels in red and blue – in some cases quite dark but quite large.…
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Boeing B17 – Part Five- The Fat Lady From Wenatchee
Well, it has been a week. The Fat Lady From Wenatchee is finished and I am delighted – so much so that I will now deliberately seek out other aircraft that can be made into civilian service aircraft. There were severe forest fires in Washington State and British Columbia in the 1970’s and a number…
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Boeing B-17 – Part Four – Bombing A Different Enemy
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…
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Boeing B-17 – Part Three – A Slight Detour
My projected mail plane needs to lose the upper and ball turret. The Academy people have not supplied blanking plates for these two gun positions so I need to occlude them with some scratch building. However, I started out with the basic cockpit and bomb bay assembly. The interior is supposedly chromate green according to…
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B-17 – Part Two – What’s In The Box?
What’s in any kit box? Hopes and fears, mostly. Hopes that the kit is all there and not fractured or warped and fears that the mould may have deteriorated with time. The decals are an entirely separate class of anxiety… In this case the sprues are nice clean Academy products, which may have been nice…
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Boeing B-17 – Part One – Why Do I Buy Famous Airplanes?
Why indeed, if I don’t intend to build the famous version? Because the famous versions are what sell to other people and that’s what the kit makers manufacture. The best I can do is look at the basic structure of the thing and see if it conforms to my plans …or can be modified enough.…
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Vought Corsair F4U-1 – Part Four – Delivery In A Plain Envelope
Students of military aviation are very quickly attuned to the finer points of insignia, markings, and unit numbers. You have only to go to some of the more intense internet modelling forums to read people engaging in passive/aggressive arguments about the exact position of the ” No Step ” stencils on the Hurricane Mk XXXIV…
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Vought CorsairF4U-1 – Part Three – Thanks, Doc…
Thank you, Dr. Tamiya. I needed that. That slap in the face with a model kit: That fits together without sanding or filing. With an entire cockpit in 1:72 as a matter of course. With wing seams that need no putty. With the engine where all cylinders are part of the injection moulding and no…
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Vought Corsair F4U-1 – Part Two – Which Came First?
Well, which came first; the chikin or the tamago? Did Tamiya get a good reputation by building precise model kits or did they build precise model kits because they had a good reputation? At what point did they say to themselves ” We must make excellent products above all…”. Did they have a modelling adolescence in which…
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Vought Corsair F4U-1 – Part One – Birdcage
I wandered into Hobbytech for a bottle of paint. I came out with three bottles of paint and a Birdcage Corsair. This is why I’m not allowed in Bunnings or the beer shop unaccompanied. To be fair I was responding to an internet search session that showed the prototype XF4U-1 aircraft Vought showed to the…
The Little World 