New office with models! Models! Models!

One of the reasons besides laziness I haven't been posting my new models is because I've been working in a temporary office since September of last year. But I'm in my new office now, and because my employers know I like to build model airplanes, they put in a large shelf that extends one whole wall length, and this nice glass display cabinet. I have room for all my models and more as I build them. But space is not infinite, and when I do eventually reach maximum shelf capacity, I'll have to let some go. Contact me if you want any. Here's a picture of the top portion I call the "Lockheed Section" of the glass case. The Boeing B-47 sits on top on the outside. It was hanging in my temporary office, but I got a Trumpeter display stand for it and I like it better this way.

Otaki 1/144 Lockheed L-1011 Demonstrator

Yes, yes, I have been building models continuously since my last blog entry which was several months ago. One of them is this nice Otaki L-1011 Tristar in 1/144 scale. This is the first time I've built one of these. I could not afford it when it came out in the late 70s. Needless to say I could barely afford this one today! This model draws high prices due to its collectability and the fact that for years it was the only decent model kit of the Tristar. Airfix's and Revell's were based on early drawings and both had misshapen noses. Otaki got theirs right and the kit is magnificent. I used Microscale's Lockheed demonstrator decals because that airplane flew over my house in Lancaster almost every day it seemed during the 70s. Microscale originally intended these decals for the Revell Tristar, but they work just fine on the Otaki one. In fact, one could probably use them just fine on the new Eastern Express L-1011 which is a completely new molding and seems to be quite accurate. Anyway, for one to make Lockheed's first L-1011 using the Microscale decals, you have to manually paint the orange panels and red stripes. What a pain! White stripes are included on the decal sheet, which makes it easy to cover up mistakes between the demarcation lines. Other than that, it's a straightforward affair as with any other airliner model. I even won second place in the 1/144 scale category at the last IPMS show in Portland OR.

Hasegawa's Classic Boeing B-47E Stratojet in 1/72 Scale!

Another model airplane kit I used to drool over at Peterson's Hobbies in Lancaster California was the Hasegawa B-47E Stratojet. It's still in production to this day I think, and older ones are still on the market at reasonable prices. The one you see here is vintage early 1970s. Hasegawa doesn't date anything on their boxes and instruction sheets, but I believe this model came out in 1973 based on reviews and advertisements about it in SCALE MODELER magazines from the time. Anyway, I built this one straight from the box with wheels up so I could hang it in my office. I think the Stratojet looks sleeker in flight too - she's really a beautiful airplane. I was originally wanting to revert her to an A model, or even a B model based on an article in an old FSM magazine, but the conversion process looked too complicated, especially in the nose area and the JATO rocket nozzles. So I just did the version she's molded in, the main production E. I used Testors buffing aluminum from a spray can and polished certain areas with a Dremel tool with buffing wheel. The anti-flash white on the undersides was painted using Tamiya white primer. Decals are stock. I left off the wing tanks to make her look more like a B model. Based on some photographs I saw, not all E models flew with the tanks on. I think she looks better this way, uncluttered and sleek.

Revell TWA Lockheed L-1011 Cutaway Display Plane

It's been almost a year since I last posted something - I've been lazy. Not with model building, but with taking pictures and posting. A fellow model builder however wrote to me today after finding this blog and now I've got some motivation to start posting again. So I'll start with a classic from 1973: the Revell "show-off" L-1011 in 1/144 scale. This kit fascinated me as a kid but I never bought it. When I finally did fly on a TWA L-1011 in the summer of 1977, the model had all but disappeared from store shelves. It's an expensive model these days on the market, but I found this affordable one on eBay in a tattered box with no decals. I used a set of TWA decals from the Otaki L-1011. The side "star streak" arrows didn't line up with the windows, but all I had to do was cut them at different locations, line them up, and cover any disparities with generic red striping decal pieces.
The cabin interior of the model was the most work. I hand painted all the seats, floors, galleys, etc. to match the box cover art. On the TWA Tristar I flew in, I don't remember the cabin being all different colors but I wanted to make the model look like the box cover.
I used Tamiya gloss white from a rattle can for the upper fuselage, and Testors canned chrome silver for the underbelly and wings. Mistakes were covered up with strips of Bare Metal Foil which blends with the Testors chrome almost perfectly. I airbrushed the inner wing panels with a mixture of flat gray and light gray.
This is a fun model to have in my office. It represents the early days of the L-1011. The Otaki L-1011 is a much more refined and detailed model, and I am currently working on one which I'll post once I'm finished.

Rareplane 1/72 Douglas C-54 Skymaster!

Here's a classic Rareplane Douglas DC-4/C-54 Skymaster vacuform model from England. Advertisements in old SCALE MODELER magazines show these were imported into the U.S. sometime in 1977. Had I found one of these at Peterson's Hobbies or one of my other favorite hobby shops in the L.A. area at the time, I would have bought it because I liked the DC-4 since I was ten. Never mind the fact that I wouldn't have been able to tackle such a difficult construction project; I had a challenging enough go at it in 2015! This is actually my second attempt at a full vacuform plastic model airplane kit, but my first successful one. The first was a 1/48 scale Ta-154 Moskito in 1994 which ended up in the trash can after a fit of rage.
This time I read some articles on vac-building from old issues of FINE SCALE MODELER. The experts were very helpful in coaching me how to properly cut out the pieces and sand them before gluing. Their main advice however was PATIENCE. This Rareplane DC-4 is made from thicker than usual sheets of plastic probably for extra strength since it's a large model. Construction was straight-forward in accordance with the simple instruction sheet provided with the kit. I had to decide early on what version to make this model, and after scouring many photographs of DC-4s and C-54s and what decals were available, I ended up settling on a straight USAAF C-54 - an early one. In fact this model represents 41-20137, the first Douglas DC-4 off the assembly line in Santa Monica, Ca. in 1942. The first 25 DC-4s ended up being basically olive drab painted airliners. 20137 and the following 24 others down the line were originally bought by American Airlines, but were commandeered by the Army for troop transport. Apparently, 28 G.I.s could be carried in luxurious comfort!
To replicate this earliest version of the Skymaster, I had to do some things: first, Rareplane molded the C-54 cargo door on the fuselage. I had to scrape all that off and sand the area down. Second, the first C-54s did not have de-icer boots so those were omitted by filling in the line which marks them along the leading edges of the wings and tails. Third, minimal antennae was installed, as pictures of some early C-54s showed mainly the basic football thing underneath and perhaps a few other doo-dads but nothing worth replicating to any extent. And finally, I applied early USAAF stars with red dots and "U.S. Army" on the wing undersides. On the real C-54s, these early stars were probably on for only a few months, maybe weeks until the 1942 blue and white stars without red dot were made standard. I would imagine in the field, the red dots were just painted over white.
Rareplane includes clear window pieces for this model, but I did not feel like spending another month

cutting each oval window opening out let alone the cockpit windows. So I just painted them black as Rareplane also suggests as an alternative. It makes the model look more like a vintage Douglas factory desk model, but it's not bad. Omitting the landing gear and the prop blades also hastened completion. A lot of filling and sanding was required along the wing joints and I'm not sure the air scoops on top of the engine nacelles are the correct length and shape, but oh well. This was quite an ambitious project for me and I'm happy with the results. She's big and looks great in my office from several feet away. I'm going to bring her up to Renton later this month for an I.PM.S. show. I doubt I'll win any award with it but I would like to show her off any way.

Otaki 1/48 Kawasaki Ki-61 "Tony"

As I was constructing the Nichimo Ki-45 I simultaneously worked on this Otaki Ki-61 because it's my second favorite Japanese subject in 1/48 scale. The Otaki Tony is a classic. It was the first one out in 1/48 scale, sometime in the late 70s. Arii got hold of it and produced it well into the 90s. I chose to build this one in a solid color like the Nick, but using a light gray in a spray can close as I could find to the medium light gray used by the Japanese Army. Again, Donald Thorpe's book was helpful in this as it showed several Tony's in basic solid color with minimal markings. No conversions here, just straight out of the box.

Nichimo 1/48 Kawasaki Ki-45 "Nick"

Although I didn't build my first one of these until about twenty years after they came out, the Nichimo Ki-45 is one of my favorite Japanese subjects in 1/48 scale. It's also featured in a 1976 issue of SCALE MODELER magazine, so I'm including it here because it's sort of a model kit from my childhood. I built the first one back in 1995 and did it straight from the box, painting it in the usual light gray-green with dark green mottling. For this second go-around, I chose to do an early version without the guns sticking out the top behind the cockpit. I also chose one of the solid color schemes the Japanese Army used - the medium blue gray. I put minimal insignia on it with no squadron or tail markings. This decision was based on some photos and diagrams I saw in Donald Thorpe's excellent book Japanese Army Air Force Camouflage and Markings by Aero Publishers, 1968.


Tamiya has the correct medium blue gray in a spray can, so painting was easy. The decals are a mix of the ones which come with the kit, and from the Otaki Ki-61.
Even though the Nick was a mediocre twin-engine fighter (like the Me-110) I still think it's a bad-ass looking airplane and I'm happy to look at it every day in my office.

Al Letcher's Mojave Meteor and Vampire in 1/48 Scale

The memory of those Saturdays spent at Mojave airport in the 70s are very special to me, and I'm happy to have finally built proper models of the two airplanes I loved to watch fly back then: Al Letcher's Armstrong Whitworth Meteor NF.11 and Dehavilland Vampire F3. Classic Airframe's 1/48 scale Meteor and Hobbycraft's Vampire in the same scale were perfect for this project. As I mentioned earlier on this blog, at the time I used to see these planes fly out at Mojave, there were no model kits of the night fighter version of the Meteor, or the early Vampire.

Classic Airframe's Meteor NF is a short-run injection kit from the Czech Republic which came out around ten years ago. It's moulded in a dark gray, brittle styrene plastic. The canopy is a horrible one-piece translucent thing, and mine had cracks in it from the factory. The pieces fit together poorly, and needed much filling and sanding, especially around the wing roots and engine pods. This didn't bother me though because I knew the whole thing was going to be sanded smooth and painted overall gloss white.
Al's Meteor was delivered to him straight from the U.K. bearing faded Royal Navy markings from it's last days in service as an aerial target tow plane. Al had the towing gear removed in England before the ferry flight across the pond. Not long after it arrived at Mojave, he had it completely covered with gloss polyurethane white to keep the aircraft cool while parked in the hot desert sun. Even though he wasn't concerned about historical accuracy with the paint job, he did have the correct size and style RAF roundels applied. He did not apply any squadron lettering or numbers. The only additional markings other than the roundels were very small registration numbers under the horizontal stabilizer, and "experimental" below the canopy opening. For my model, I chose not to duplicate the registration numbers or the "experimental" but I did apply the correct size and style roundels. I had to do some small modifications such as remove the guns from the wing leading edges, and scratch build a small antenna of some kind just aft of the front wheel well, and another antenna or vane underneath the left engine pod. I have no idea what these were on Al's Meteor; I wasn't able to find any reference to these on the internet either in pictures or schematics. They could have been something associated with the target towing role.
As for the Vampire, Al bought his F3 from a guy named Pete Regina in Van Nuys Ca. Pete had purchased the Vampire from another owner either in the late 60s or early 70s, and had it in restoration for a few years. Pete had a zero-time surplus Goblin engine installed, and painted the airplane to look like an RAF Vampire, even though this particular F3 flew operationally with the Canadian Air Force. When Al bought it from Pete, it apparently didn't need any work on the outside, so it stayed in its ersatz RAF scheme during it's tenure at Mojave. I chose to replicate this on my model, using Testors Model Master RAF Medium Green and Sea Gray. The underside is gloss silver with no roundels or squadron lettering, as per the actual airplane back then. I have no idea if Pete Regina's RAF squadron markings and lettering were correct, or if it was something he made up just to look like an RAF Vampire. At any rate, I applied "YG" and "VN68" using spare USAF lettering decals, with some correct Vampire roundels.
I love having these two models together on my office bookshelf. They were two very special airplanes in those days. At the time
the Vampire was the oldest jet airplane flying in the U.S. It flew pretty much continuously under different owners until just a few years ago when it crash landed and was totaled in Wisconsin. The Meteor was retired to static display sometime in the early 1980s and I think is still somewhere around Mojave or Edwards AFB.

DC-8-61 Dress-Up

After several months on the shelf, I found I really didn't like my Revell DC-8-61
built last year without Flying Tiger colors, so I found a replacement Revell/Lodella sheet on EBay. I took a big risk being as old as they are, but thankfully they were in perfect condition and slid nicely off the backing sheet onto the model. I used MicroSet and found the acid in that stuff slightly etched the polished aluminum metalizer around the decals. It's not exactly what I wanted, but oh well - lesson learned. You can't really see it from a distance. Next time I apply decals to highly polished metalizer, no products, just water! Nevertheless, she looks stunning in her Flying Tiger Line trim and reinforces the memories I have of these slender giants flying overhead in Lancaster.

Another Williams Bros. Northrop Gamma!

I built another Williams Bros. Gamma into the Ellsworth Phase One version. Not much to say about the whole building experience other than it was fun to modify some of the pieces for this version. Painting was a little simpler in that Ellsworth's Gamma was not as shiny as the Texaco version, so not as much time was spent buffing the Testors aluminum metalizer. Decals went on perfectly, and the whole thing took less than ten hours.

Monogram 1/48 Northrop P-61A Black Widow

I really like the Monogram 1/48 scale airplane kits which came out in 1974. Monogram was growing with the kids who bought their simpler models in the 60s, and knew they wanted more detail and a more challenging building experience. That's why I really like the TBD-1 Devastator because it's a kit you can really sink your teeth into and enjoy without a lot of frustration. The same goes for the P-61 Black Widow which came out around the same time as the Devastator. Both models were preceded by the excellent 1/48 Dornier Do-335 Arrow, but I have never built that model. Maybe some day though.
Originally, the Monogram P-61 was given to me as a gift by my Godmother in 1977. It was one of the few gifted airplane models given to me which I really liked and was excited about. I know that sounds ungrateful, but as I've admitted earlier in this blog, I was very picky when it came to model airplanes. But I really enjoyed my first building experience with this model. Because it's molded in black, I didn't paint my original, and it looked fine that way. I did however paint all the interior detail in accordance with the directions, and the P-61 (B version) sat proudly on my bedroom shelf for a long time.
I bought the one pictured here several years ago and when it finally came time to open it up and get started on it, I was thrilled. I debated on what version to make it - olive drab - black - A or B - top turret or no turret - and finally decided on a black A with no top turret, factory fresh. I had seen a color picture of a turret-less A sitting on the Northrop ramp right out of the paint shop, all glossy and nice, and knew that is what I had to do. Even though the top gun turret is a prime feature of the Black Widow, the fact that it was temporarily deleted from both A and B versions due to buffeting is historically interesting. Along with that the airplane is a little sleeker looking to me with the flat top.
Construction was straight forward in accordance with the instructions - for that "sleek" look I glued all gun and engine access panels closed, as well as canopy hatches. I didn't like that Monogram molded the right engine cowl flaps open, while the left are closed - you have no options there and it doesn't look right unless you are making a diorama. So I cut between each cowl flap and pushed them inward to the closed position as best I could. I made sure I gave the model two weeks to dry after spraying it gloss black overall to prevent finger prints and smudges. The original decals were brittle, so I only used the small emergency and maintenance stencils. I used a Microscale P-61 decal sheet for the red tail boom numbers and the red wing top walkway lines. It was so much easier using the one-piece aftermarket decal for those red lines on the wing than doing Monogram's original procedure of cutting them to size and fit yourself from a large strip of red decal. That and the open cowl flap cowling are the only beefs I have with this model. Otherwise it's a beautiful, classic kit from Monogram you can still buy today online and at hobby shops.

Blue Neptune! Building Hasegawa's Lockheed P-2V-7 for the First Time

I've always liked the Lockheed P-2 Neptune, but never bought Hasegawa's 1/72 model of it throughout it's long life of various issues and reissues. Earlier this year though I picked a sealed one up at a model show in Renton Washington for only ten bucks. It was the original Minicraft U.S. offering from about 1973 in the Dark Blue USN scheme. I figured this would be the easiest version to make since it was one color, and glossy too which would mean no clear coat. Boy was I wrong! This model was by no means easy to build and paint. It required a lot of strategic planning to figure out the best sequence of building vs. painting. I ended up assembling most of it before shooting it with a coat of Testors Dark Sea Blue from a spray can. The engines in their cowlings waited to go on until final assembly because there's all this bare metal area between them and the nacelle roots on the wings - that being the cowl flaps and exhaust plates. I didn't care to go hog wild with the interior detail, since most can't be seen through the clear plastic any ways. I didn't go crazy on exterior detail either since the kit didn't come with all the tiny white maintenance and caution stencils. But I did outline some of the windows and the searchlight dome with gold and silver strips of Bare Metal Foil. I knew this bird was going to be tail-heavy, so I stuffed the lower radome bulge full with clay and fishing weights. It didn't make a bit of difference! The thing is so tail heavy, it needs a pound of weight forward of the engines which there is hardly any room for. But after all was said and done, I'm happy with it, and will enjoy it on my office book shelf for years to come (I hope.)

Monogram TBD-1 Devastator Round Three!

I wasn't really happy with the Devastator I built a couple years ago, which is featured earlier on this blog. The Tamiya yellow on the wings and tail was just not right, and the decals were a disaster. So I sold it on EBay, bought another one, along with a sheet of Microscale decals to make any of the TBDs in pre-war finish. I thought it would be nice to do this third one up in a non-squadron commander's scheme, you know, just a regular bird with minimal markings. The cover of the April 1975 Scale Modeler magazine featuring the kit shortly after it came out was my inspiration. It shows three Devastators flying in formation. I chose to do 5-T-3 shown closest in the front. This meant I only had to worry about two colors. Well, three actually: flat aluminum, chrome yellow, and bright red. The Microscale decal sheet did not come with the wing chevrons, so any color than red would have had to be painted on, and with those ribs on the tops of the wings - forget it! I wasn't about to struggle with trying to get airtight masking over the ribs and touching up afterwards. So I chose the red tail scheme so I could use the wing chevrons that come with the kit. For the chrome yellow wings, I used regular Testors Yellow from a rattle can, which is very close to chrome yellow. It's full-bodied, with a slight orange tint. I even wrapped the yellow over the wing's leading edge like it's supposed to be. It was extra work, but looks great especially with the wings folded. I left the torpedo off, because I like the sleek body shape of the TBD. But I wanted to include the MK13 torpedo somewhere near the plane, so I ordered a resin USN torpedo loading cart from a company in New Zealand. I'm very happy with this model, and I'm keeping this baby for a while to enjoy.

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.