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.

Revell 1/144 DC-8-61 The Plane That Started It All!

So far in this blog I've re-built all the plastic model airplane kits (and a couple spacecraft and airships) I had as a kid growing up in our first house in Lancaster, California. In late 1976, we moved to another home on the outskirts of Lancaster, and I continued my model building there even on the day we moved in, with a Monogram 1/72 scale P-51B Mustang bought from Gemco department store. Many other kits followed including a Revell "Calypso" PBY Catalina given to me as a gift from the realtor who sold us our new home. I'm not going to rebuild all the kits from that era of my modeling days, but I will cover some which are very important to me such as the Hasegawa Mig-25 Foxbat, and the Revell Space Shuttle Enterprise with 747 (posts forthcoming.)
What I'd like to do starting with this post, is go back to that first day in Lancaster when my family and I surveyed our new home then under construction. This would have been sometime in the Fall of 1974. The Flying Tiger Line DC-8 "stretch" flying overhead, doing touch and gos at Palmdale Air Force Facility was the ship I'll never forget from that day, along with a Lockheed C-141A Starlifter. When I started building models, no store in our town had the Revell United DC-8-61 kit on their shelves, so I never bought it. I certainly would have though had I known about it.
Pictured here is a Revell DC-8-61 I've just completed as a straight passenger version with no livery,
in honor of those Flying Tigers ships I saw so many years ago. This kit was actually a Revell/Lodella Flying Tigers DC-8-61F, but the decals were totally unusable, even with the application of Microscale clear decal film. I was kind of bummed by this, but in actuality, it wouldn't have been a correct representation of what I saw way back when. Flying Tigers flew the DC-8-63F in 1974, and the Revell kit does not have the correct engines. Flying Tigers did have one or two Dash 61s, but it's not likely I saw those flying around Palmdale. What would be ideal is Minicraft's new DC-8-63 kit with FDCAL's Flying Tiger DC-8-63 decal set. Unfortunately, they are out of print, and very hard to find. If I ever do find a set, I'll do it up right but for now, this old Revell kit will suffice.
The ship was painted overall Testors aluminum plate buffing type from a rattle can,  buffed to a high shine using a Dremel tool with buffing wheel. I left a forward and aft fuselage plug unbuffed for a little differential effect. I did this with the wing control surfaces and the aft end of the engine fairings as well. The wing panels and radome are light aircraft gray. The windows are from an old ATP generic DC-8 window decal sheet. Thank goodness for that at least!

Another AMT Airship: the USS Akron!

In 1976, about a year after they released their famous Hindenburg model, AMT produced another airship kit, the USS Akron/Macon. For me, this is another one of those strange omissions from my youth. I loved airships--especially the U.S. Navy ones. So why didn't I buy this kit back in '76? I have no idea other than I was probably too distracted by other airplane kits and simply didn't have enough money to finance all my wants and desires. To finally build this model all these years later was extremely rewarding and at the same time frustrating. While it looks like AMT tried to make some improvements over the Hindenburg, some of the same glaring errors exist on the Akron/Macon. For instance the exterior surface still has that over-exaggerated phony texture that just doesn't translate well to a model of this scale. The struts and braces for the props and control surfaces are way too thick. The extra bracing for the main fins are to be totally discarded and scratch built if one wishes to replicate this later modification to the real airships. I chose to model an early Akron without the bracing. All-in-all though, it does come out to make a very nice model which goes well as a companion to the Hindenburg. She will remain in my collection permanently.

Italeri Soviet Air Force La-5N

Just before Christmas 2013 I finished this Italeri Lavochkin La-5N Soviet WWII fighter. I originally built one of these over a weekend at my friend Phil's house sometime in early 1977. It was not long after I finished it I got my first airbrush on my 13th birthday. I always thought this was kind of an ugly airplane, and I really don't remember why I bought it the first time other than it was probably cheap at Peterson's hobby shop, or that it was Russian and cool. At any rate, I had fun building it again, because it is an excellent little kit - very detailed and crisply molded. By 1975 when this model came out, Italeri was producing excellent quality model kits in 1/72 scale. To this day, the La-5 remains the only Italeri model kit I've ever built. I do plan on building more however such as their outstanding C-119 Flying Boxcar and YF-12A to name a couple.
The rebuild seen here was painted with Testors Model Master Russian Underside Blue (hand-painted) and Testors Dark Green on top from a spray can. The metal panels around the exhaust is metal foil applied with Micro adhesive. I didn't bother to detail the interior since it can't really be seen through the tiny canopy piece.

Airfix O-1F Bird Dog

Right after I got done with the C-46 I quickly got going on another Airfix favorite of mine: the Cessna O-1 Bird Dog. My original one was built in 1976, and I have strong memories of taking it with me to an overnight stay at a hotel in Los Angeles for a wedding my family and I attended. I painted that original one O.D. with South Vietnamese Air Force markings like the cover art. But for this rebuild I chose to model the USAF version in semi-gloss light aircraft gray. Humbrol 166 was the perfect color for it. For such a small model, it took me a long time to build mainly because Humbrol paints take forever to dry, and I had to do a lot of re-touching to correct errors. It's a fun little model to have again, and brings back memories of that trip to L.A. with Elton John & Kiki Dee's "Don't Go Breakin' My Heart" playing on the car radio.