Tri-Pacer Redux

I was not really happy with that all-yellow Tri-Pacer I did a while back, so I bought another Tri-Pacer on EBay, one that's molded in the correct cream color, and made her up to look like she's supposed to. The color scheme and pattern corresponds to Piper's early to mid-1950s version. Later, less expensive Tri-Pacers had a simplified paint scheme. When modeling this bird, the early body color pattern is a real chore to mask and paint. I kept the background color the original cream-colored plastic, while the red is standard Testors gloss spray. Masking was done using Pactra racing car trim tape, which is expensive, but works really well. You get a large choice of widths to work with, from 1/32 of an inch to about half and inch. The interior was painted red to match the outside panels, but the seats were painted flat red, then covered with a coat of Micro Gloss for a semi-gloss leathery look. I even painted the two hunter figures and dead mountain lion. I'm not big into pilot and crew figures, but these guys are classic! The Civil Air Patrol decals were added to later reissues of the model, but if you put them on and display the aircraft with the hunters, it's an odd combination. Throughout CAP's history many aircraft used in search and rescue were not corporately owned, so its not unrealistic for a privately owned aircraft to be used on a hunting trip with CAP insignia on it.

This is the fifth Monogram Piper Tri-Pacer I have built in my lifetime, and probably my last. This one here is the best of them all-I don't think I could do any better.

A True Classic: The Monogram 1/144 Apollo Saturn V

When the Apollo program was gearing up for the first lunar landing, both Revell and Monogram were quick to offer the public scale models of the Apollo hardware. When it came to the full-stack Apollo-Saturn vehicle, Revell had their monstrous and complex 1/96 scale kit, while Monogram chose to make a simpler, more manageable one in 1/144 scale. Both are undeniable classics because they're still available today in quantity - the 1/96 scale giant from Revell/Germany, and the Monogram one by Revell/Monogram in the U.S.
When I was around three years old, my Dad bought the Monogram Apollo-Saturn, probably from the North American company store in Downey. I have faint memories of him putting it together at a picnic table on our back porch. The finished kit stood proudly in our music room (shown here) and later on the fireplace mantle (probably because me and the other rug rats kept messing with it.)

I've never built the original Revell Apollo, but the Monogram one you see below is my third. It was a vintage kit from 1968, just like the one my Dad built 45 years ago.
Monogram's kit must have been engineered from early plans of the Apollo-Saturn hardware, because the interstage ring has eight ullage motors around it, and the Command and Service Modules appear to be the Block One type. The box top has a nice illustrated painting diagram of the 500F Facilities Test Vehicle, while the instruction sheet guides the builder to paint the rocket closer to what Apollo 4 looked like during stacking in the Vertical Assembly Building. I'm not sure about Apollo 6, but by the end of 1968, the Apollo 8 stack had six ullage motors on the ring, shorter black panels on the first stage without horizontal stripe, and the Service module was silver with some white panels. This is what Apollos 9 through 17 would look like following.
If I'm correct, Monogram never bothered to update their Apollo-Saturn model kit to look like the later vehicles. In fact, the last boxing from 1994 still shows an Apollo Saturn vehicle leaving earth's atmosphere with the old 500F roll pattern on the first stage!
For this rebuild, I chose to make it exactly in accordance with the instruction sheet, which in my opinion, comes out looking pretty close to Apollo 4; except Apollo 4 had American Flags on the first stage, and in some photographs, appears to have a silver Service Module. At any rate, Monogram's Apollo-Saturn is a historical snapshot in plastic of a time when Apollo was still going through development and improvement.

Monogram 1/72 F7F Tigercat

Next off the assembly line is this vintage 1973 Monogram Grumman F7F Tigercat. This was another model kit that I really liked as a kid, but for some reason never bought or received one as a gift. It's taken 37 years to finally build it. About half-way through the construction process however, I discovered it was missing one of the main landing gear struts. Though it's one of Monogram's high-quality 1/72 offerings from the mid-sixties, it was engineered for gears-down only. The main gear doors are permanently molded in the open position on the nacelles. I figured rather than throwing the kit in the trash and getting another one later, I'd just modify this one into a gears-up bird. After all, it came with a display stand. So, using a great deal of thumb and forefinger pressure, I snapped the gear doors off the nacelles, filed and sanded the openings and the doors so they would fit flush, and she looks fine. I gave her a coat of Testors spray Dark Sea Blue because the molded blue plastic was too light and dull for a post-war Navy bird. The original decals went on without a hitch.
In my opinion, the Tigercat is one bad-ass looking twin fighter, and I'm happy to have a model of it (finally) in my collection.

Williams Bros. 1/72 Boeing 247D (USAAC C-73)

A kit I would drool over at every visit to Peterson Hobbies was the Williams Bros. Boeing 247. For some reason though, I never bought it, nor asked for it as a gift. Just last month I finally lived the dream: I built the sucker! I found an old opened but complete one on EBay for a reasonable price. The decals were moisture damaged, and instead of buying an aftermarket set, I chose to make it a U.S. Army Air Corps C-73 transport.
According to the history books and a few photographs, the USAAC lifted 27 Boeing 247s from the airlines to serve as personnel transports. This happened some time in 1942, hence the rather high designation number for such an old airplane. One can find about a half dozen decent photographs of C-73s on the Internet. One interesting one is shown on a Boeing advertisement in a magazine from 1942. It shows an olive drab painted C-73 with 1942 style stars, and no other visible markings. Another shows what may be an all metal finish or gray-painted 247 with 1943 style stars and bars. It's hard to know if the C-73s had the forward-pointed windshield or the slicked-back "Turner" windshield, or a mixture of both. I figured the Army most likely had both, depending on whatever they grabbed from United, Western, or whomever was flying them at the time. I wasn't worried either about the accuracy of the color scheme or the stars for my model, since all 27 C-73s could have looked different. I put the number "04" on the tail, to suggest it was an early conscript, and perhaps the fourth 247 to be put into military service. The interior is the standard United Airlines scheme. The few pictures I found of C-73s were taken at U.S. military airfields, suggesting that perhaps these ships were flown mainly within the CONUS as short-hoppers for brass going from base to base for meetings, formations, and such.

Regardless of whether or not my "C-73" is accurate, it was fun to build and I like the way it looks. This was Williams Bros. first full airplane model kit. Before the 247 they had made scale models of vintage rotary airplane motors and machine guns. I can't say it's the most well-engineered kit I've ever put together; there are numerous problems with poor fitting parts. This model, and the ones that followed such as the Martin B-10B, Northrop Gamma, and Curtiss C-46 were intended for experienced modelers skilled at manipulating styrene and modifying small plastic parts. Still, this is one I'm going to keep on my shelf for a while.

Entex 1/144 Lockheed C-5A Galaxy

I started working on this Entex C-5A Galaxy before Christmas! It was a partially built kit I won on Ebay. The wings had been poorly glued together with some kind of cheap adhesive maybe twenty, thirty years ago. The fuselage halves had pits and stains on them. The right half window piece was cemeted in, but the other two clear pieces were missing. Thankfully, the decal sheet was complete and untainted, so I went about restoring the parts to their original condition before assembly. That took about a whole month of disassembling the wings, filling and sanding the pits and flaws, and polishing the pieces.

Once I got started building, things went pretty smoothly until painting. I used Tamiya gloss white spray for the top fuselage half, but failed to put primer down before that. When I masked the top half to paint the lower half Aircraft Gray, the tape peeled away the white! So I had to start over again using some Testors gloss white. Not exactly what I had planned, but it turned out okay. I debated airbrushing the lower gray versus brush painting, and I chose the latter because I was fed-up with masking. From a foot away, you don't really notice the unevenness of the finish. To try and make the surface look more even, I sprayed the whole thing flat, then gloss again for a semi-gloss look. I was worried about the original decals; vintage Entex decals are notorious for breaking apart into a million pieces when disolved in water. But after testing a couple of the ridiculous Pan Am decals included on the sheet, I happily found them to be quite good, and they applied with no problems. Even if the original decals hadn't worked, I would have bought a set from Draw Decal, which makes an excellent sheet complete with door outlines, windows, and walkway stripes.

When I was a kid I couldn't afford this model, and today it's still way over-priced. I guess that's because no model company since Otaki in 1971 has released an updated 1/144 C-5 - not even Anigrand. Entex marketed the Otaki kit in the early 70s, and when they went out of business in the early 80s, Revell got the molds and released it as part of their modern USAF airplane series which included the excellent KC-10, KC-135, and B-52H, all in constant 1/144 scale. Later on, Testors got the molds and released it as a "B" model in Euro-One paint scheme. I believe that was the last time the kit was released. I wonder where those Otaki molds are today?
My copy here is by no means perfect. I suppose if I wanted perfection, or something close to it, I would have airbrushed the whole thing, and used Draw's detail-enhancing decals. But this one definately has the vintage, early 70s "boy-built" look, which fits in well with the rest of my rebuild collection.

HAWK U.S. Navy TV-2

I remember buying the Hawk Lockheed TV-2 at Peterson's Hobbies & Crafts because the picture of the assembled model on the box looked very colorful and detailed. Upon opening the box at home however, I discovered a pretty basic kit molded in translucent white plastic! The decals were not the ones shown on the box cover, and the instructions also showed a different version. I built and painted the thing any way, and it looked horrible. I didn't paint the translucent white parts, and the red I hand-brushed using Testors flat insignia red - awful! But, I remember having lots of fun building it because the instructions had Captain Hawk, an illustrated character yelling out commands such as, "You're getting sloppy with that paint!"
In rebuilding this kit, I discovered why the kit shown on the box top differs from the kit inside. Apparently Hawk's original TV-2 kit from 1959 (shown left) had the correct early Navy version illustrated on the box, which jived with the decals and instructions. Hawk reissued the kit in 1965, but chose to show a TV-2 built by a professional modeler on the box top. This pro apparently decided to model a TV-2 in a later Navy scheme, and used his own decals from the scrap box. It's a nice looking model, but unfortunately deceives the buyer into thinking he can build the same thing.

I chose to build the kit in the original 1950s scheme. To my delight the parts were molded in a thick, semi-gloss white styrene, which meant I didn't have to paint them white. The red panel I painted using Tamiya gloss red. I stuck to Captain Hawk's painting suggestions in the plans, which results in a pretty decent looking model. The original decals had yellowed a bit, but went on nicely. This is one of Hawk's semi-action kits, with removable tail section and engine ala-Lindberg. The canopy also moves up and down; other than that there are no moving parts.

Airfix Britten-Norman Islander

To the best of my recollection the Airfix 1/72 scale B.N. 2 Islander is the last model airplane kit I built before I moved from our first Lancaster home on East Avenue J-5, to a new mobile home on 20th Street East. I remember picking it out from the shelf at Peterson Hobbies and my Dad saying, "Looks like an Aero Commander." That made me want to get it because I liked the Aero Commander. I would see the Rockwell company Commander fly over our house every now and then, and my Dad had great stories of being shuttled around in it during trips between Downey and Palmdale. I would have bought a model of the Commander if there were one available at the time. Comet's little Aero Commander 680 kit along with Aurora's reissue were long since out of production by the time I started building models; and I had no knowledge they even existed until years later when I started trolling through kit auctions on EBay. Nevertheless, Airfix's Islander was the next best thing, and I liked it. I still do.
The kit is molded in bright yellow, so overall painting is not necessary unless you want the model to look more like the real orangish-yellow of Aurigny's old paint scheme. Once the thing is all put together and the decals applied though, the original yellow doesn't look all that bad. Some dark red needs to be applied though on the tops of the engine nacelles, along with flat black de-icer boots. I painted the seats blue as per the instructions, but went a step further and painted the control panel and dash board flat black. Airfix instructions can be rather lacking in painting suggestions.
Build-wise the model is very detailed and accurate in scale, but suffers from poor fit, especially the fuselage halves and wing mount. Airfix decals over thirty years old can be hit or miss as far as usefulness, but the ones of this Islander rebuild were acceptable.
This is a fun little model to have again on the shelf, and reminds me of a time where I transitioned not only to a new home, but to mostly 1/72 scale aircraft.