Roscoe Turner's 247D Earns 3rd Place at IPMS Evergreen Show!

I think the judges at these IPMS shows like the Williams Bros. kits as much as I do. My Gamma won last year, and this year my Boeing 247D racer won - and I did a very simple, straight from the box job on it! Maybe next year I'll enter my C-46 Commando.

The Mig-25 Gets a New Pitot Tube!

I wasn't happy with a probe-less MiG-25, so I searched EBay and was delighted to find a company makes turned brass ones for the ICM kit. I figured it would work fine for the Hasegawa one as well, so I ordered it for only $4.95. I sanded down the point on the nose cone, drilled a small hole for the probe, and installed it with super glue. Being brass, it was gold so I painted it with Testors Steel. It's much sturdier than the original plastic probe I broke during main assembly. Now I can sleep at night knowing my MiG-25 has all her parts!

Hasegawa Mig-25: The one that got away!

I remember hearing about the Viktor Belenko defection on the news back in late '76 and when old man Peterson at his hobby shop showed me an advertisement from Hasegawa of their upcoming model of Belenko's Mig-25, I was thrilled! He told me he'd put me on the list for the first ones to arrive, and a couple weeks later he called, and I got my Foxbat. I think the plastic parts were still warm from the injection molding machine! It was an exciting time for modelers and an exciting model to put together. I was still a few months away from getting my Badger 350 airbrush on my birthday, but I didn't do a bad job brush painting the Mig.
On this rebuild I sprayed it with Tamiya Light Ghost Gray, which is fairly close to the medium gray recommended on the instruction sheet. I checked first though and nobody makes the "medium gray" either in bottle or spray that Hasegawa lists in the painting diagram. At any rate, new and old color pictures of Foxbats show many different shades of gray so who's to say what's right or wrong?
It was fun to revisit this model and notice the crisp clean molding, but many joints and assembly lines didn't quite line up and required much putty and sanding. Perhaps the engineers at Hasegawa were a little to anxious to get this model on the market. At any rate, I had fun building it again, and aside from the nose pitot tube I broke off during handling and couldn't find, I think it looks fine. Belenko's Mig was unarmed when he defected so I left the missiles off on this rebuild.

Another Williams Bros. Boeing 247! This time it's Roscoe Turner's Racer

I like the Williams Bros. Boeing 247 so much I decided to do another one as the Turner Racer shown on the box top. I also wanted it "wheels up" and that saved a lot of time. Yes, I actually used the Williams Bros. clear display stand included with the kit! I also inserted a Roscoe Turner like figure into the pilot's seat. He's actually the leftover pilot from the Italeri La-5. To simulate the spinning props I simply removed the blades from their hubs. Even with gear up though I still had to install some of the landing gear struts into their slots. I sprayed it overall Testors Gloss Gull Gray to replicate Turner's airplane after it had received a gloss gray paint job at some time during or after the race.

Airfix/MPC 1/144 McDonnell-Douglas DC-10 American Airlines

My first ever airplane ride was in a TWA Lockheed L-1011 in the summer of '77. My family and I flew the red-eye nonstop from LAX to Newark NJ. The return flight was from Boston Logan to LAX nonstop on an American Airlines DC-10. I don't know if it was a dash 10 or 30, but I remember the DC-10 being a slightly better ride than the Tristar. I'll explain more about that in a future blog when I build the Revell L-1011. What I remember being really cool about the DC-10 was that it had a T.V. tube screen mounted in the bulkhead in front of our seats. The pilot turned on a closed-circuit video of the cockpit so we could see what takeoff looked like from the flight deck. On all the airline flights I've been on since, I've never seen any other airline do that.
Any way, I've built this MPC DC-10 in memory of that homeward flight at the end of my summer vacation back east in 1977. I also remember seeing a few DC-10s fly the circuit around Palmdale Air Force Facility, but they were outnumbered by L-1011s.

On this model I filled and sanded all the windows, polished the bare plastic to a smooth gloss, then masked and sprayed the gray areas with Tamiya Light Ghost Gray. I added a little more detail by painting the reinforced sections on the tail engine. The rest was sprayed with Testors aluminum buffing metalizer and buffed with a Dremel tool. I buffed lighter on the forward fuselage section to replicate the slight difference in shine on the actual N102AA. I did not use the kit decals, as they just didn't look right, so I replaced them with a set from ATP. Unfortunately it was a used set, and was missing the silver outlined windows. I used regular black window decals from a generic DC-10 set from Draw Decal.
All in all I think she looks good, although there are some inherent engineering problems with the Airfix DC-10. The engine pods on the wing hang way too low, and exterior detail is lacking. I hear Revell's DC-10 isn't much better, and Aurora's is to be avoided unless you want that executive desk model look. Interestingly, no model company has tooled a completely new DC-10 in 1/144 since Revell's in 1971! Welsh models makes a vacuform one, but vacuform and I don't get along very well.

A True Scale Model Classic: The IMC 1/48 Lear Jet!

In 1977 I bought and built the Testors 1/48 scale Lear Jet. At the time I had no idea it was a reissue of an earlier Lear Jet model by IMC. When I got back into building model airplanes several years ago, I discovered the IMC version while perusing kits on EBay. I found the one pictured here at the Northwest I.P.M.S. spring show in Renton Saturday before last. I built it in just over a week. The Testors reissue seemed to have retained the rubber tires, chrome-plated and colored plastic bits of its IMC predecessor, but Testors updated the fuselage to reflect the newer Lear 25. The IMC kit is an early Lear 24 with the large oval windows. Having built both the Testors and the IMC Lear Jet, I think I like the IMC one better because of the large windows and the fact that it was the first plastic model kit of the Lear Jet. It was fun to build, and I would agree with the box top which says, "This kit is not intended for beginners." The full interior takes much time to assemble and paint, and fitting all the bits in while gluing the fuselage halves together is a challenge - I remember the same frustration from the Testors kit back in '77! After all is said and done though, I'm very happy with it and I look forward to displaying it in my office.

Anigrand 1/144 Lockheed C-141A Starlifter

This Anigrand C-141A is only the second resin model kit I've ever built. The first one was a 1/48 scale Feiseler 103 piloted "Buzz Bomb" back in the mid 1990s, and that was just a single chunk of resin with a clear vacuform canopy. This C-141A is like a traditional injection-molded kit, with many parts and sub assemblies. After having completed it, I can say I prefer regular plastic kits over resin. Resin parts, especially the large flat ones like the wings and fuselage have a strange texture to them, which shows through the paint job. No amount of sanding and buffing seems to smooth them out completely. At any rate, when you look at this model from a foot away or more, the surface texture is hardly noticeable. The reason I bought this model is because I want to build a collection of airplanes I admired in my youth in standard 1/144 scale. The Anigrand C-141A is the only one available in 1/144. Just watch though; it'll be just my luck that Roden, Minicraft, or Amodel will come out with one here in the next few months!

While I admire the classic Aurora C-141A, 1/108 scale just doesn't go with anything else. And painting it in the USAF's gray & white scheme would be difficult due to finding the right decals to go on it. DML's crisp 1/200 C-141A is too diminutive in my opinion. This Anigrand kit is just right!
I won't go into detail about building it. All I can say is I spent a lot of time filling, filing, and sanding. For the aircraft gray, Testors makes the correct color in a bottled gloss enamel and acrylic. But they don't include it in their line of rattle can sprays. I really didn't want to break out the old airbrush, as I'm just too lazy to deal with mixing and cleanup any more. So I found the next best thing: Tamiya spray Luftwaffe Light Blue. It's an exact match to the Testors Aircraft Gray in the bottle. The Tamiya paint is matte, so a coat of clear gloss is needed to bring out that realistic USAF Aircraft Gray (aka. Air Defense Command Gray.) To me it looks fabulous, and sure beats brush painting it like I did earlier on the Otaki C-5A - no streaks! I used Tamiya gloss white spray on the upper fuselage.
Not all the parts lined up correctly on this resin kit, but once everything is painted and adorned with the excellent decals included, you hardly notice the imperfections. I have it in mind to build one more 1/144 scale airplane from Anigrand, and that is the XB-70. Unless of course some fine model company comes out with a styrene one before I get around to buying it.
Oh, and by the way, the reason this model appears on this blog is because C-141As from Norton AFB did touch and go's at Palmdale Air Force Facility
all the time when we moved to Lancaster in '74. It seemed I saw them every day for a year flying overhead with those screaming P&W TF33 turbofans. It's another important airplane to me that fueled my interest in aviation.