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.

Williams Bros. C-46 Commando Early USAAC Version

I've mentioned several times throughout this blog that I rarely saved enough money when I was a kid to buy the more expensive, challenging model airplane kits. The Williams Bros. C-46 is an exception. I wanted it badly in 1977, and one day that year I finally had enough cash to plunk down and get it. I was still in my pre-airbrush, fine-finishing days, and that first C-46 looked, well, not so good. I used Testors silver to make the all-metal 1944 version and it had lots of streaks. That plus the some of the advanced construction requirements such as having to cut out the landing gear doors from the main lower wing half piece was a bit past my skill level. But, it was a prized model in my collection for years afterwards.
For this rebuild, I chose to do the early U.S. Army Air Corps version. In fact, the decals provided for this version by Williams Bros. replicate the first C-46 delivered to the Army in 1942. I'm a sucker for early versions of airplanes because they represent an original idea, and often look much cleaner over later versions which tend to have more stuff having from them such as antennae, bulbous radomes, and gangly weapons pods. To do this for the C-46 model, one has to scrape off the stiffeners on the rear fuselage below the vertical stabilizer. The easy parts however are the navigation dome on top of the fuselage can be ignored, antennae are at a bare minimum, and you don't have to drill out the gun ports on the side windows.
I came close to airbrushing this model because Testors does not make Neutral Gray in a spray can. I did however find some made by Tamiya. So I sprayed the underside with the Tamiya Neutral Gray, then masked the lower surface with paper cut to shape, and raised ever so slightly from the model surface with yellow tack tape, then sprayed Testors Olive Drab on top surfaces. The result is as good as I could have done with an airbrush. I only had to clean up a few spots of O.D. overspray. The brilliant thing was, the Tamiya gray is a lacquer, so a Q-Tip lightly soaked in enamel thinner cleanly wiped away the O.D. without affecting the gray one bit.
When set next to the other Williams Bros. kits such as the Boeing 247 and the B-10, one quickly realizes what a huge airplane the C-46 really is. I remember seeing the one on display at the Pima County Air Museum in Tucson, Arizona for the first time. When I walked into the hangar, I was immediately stuck by the huge size of the Commando. I'm glad to have this large scale model back on display in my collection. 

Third-place winner! Williams Bros. Northrop Gamma

When I bought the Williams Bros. 1/72 scale Northrop Gamma sometime back in 1977, my modeling skills had finally developed to the point I could successfully tackle such an advanced kit. After all, I'd had over fifty models under my belt by then, maybe more. I remember building the Texaco Sky Chief Phase II version, like the painting on the box top. I chose the same version to rebuild, because it requires the least modifications to the parts. The major one is cutting out the rectangles for the windows in the fuselage sides. Other than that, the kit is pretty much straight forward. My original one was hand-painted with Testors silver, complete with streaks and fingerprints. For this rebuild, I sprayed it with Testors Aluminum buffing metalizer from a can. Then I power-buffed it with a Dremel tool with cloth polishing wheel. Like the Boeing 247 I did earlier, it took a lot of buffing to get the shine. I had to recharge my Dremel's battery more than once. It's one of those things where you just want to keep on buffing because you think you're going to get a better shine. But I think I got the best I could get. The original Microscale decals went on perfectly using the Micro system. A local I.P.M.S. collector's show was coming up at the Evergreen Aviation Museum, so I decided to enter the Gamma in the "Civil/Sport, etc." category. I won third place! I really like this little kit, and I'm looking forward to completing my Williams Bros. collection with the C-46 Commando, which should be the next entry on this blog.

 

Williams Bros. Colorful 1/72 Martin B-10B Bomber!

I'm on a bit of a Williams Bros. kick right now; in fact right after I finished this Martin B-10B I started on the 1/72 scale Northrop Gamma. I never had the B-10B as a kid, but I remember seeing it at Peterson Hobbies. I was never really interested in the airplane - it looked kind of ugly to me. But I picked this one up a year ago at a model swap meet at the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville, Oregon for ten bucks. I figured if I ever got around to building it fine; if not, I'd re-sell it. But after building and making-over the challenging Boeing 247, it seemed to me this B-10B would also be a fun challenge. I really like these old Williams Bros. 1/72 scale airplanes because they are for skilled craftsmen who know how to manipulate styrene plastic. You have to do a fair amount of cutting, scribing, chopping, and scratch-building to get the desired result. Plus, the Williams Bros. give you several options of aircraft versions to choose from. For this B-10B, you get to choose from the first USAAC gloss olive drab & chrome yellow scheme, to the middle cobalt blue/chrome yellow version, or the late 30s, early 40s silver-metallic painted scheme. I chose the middle one because I like the glossy blue/yellow contrast. It was easy to do as well because the fuselage parts are already moulded in the correct color, except for the vertical fin, which must be masked off and painted yellow. I already had a bottle of Testors gloss French Blue enamel, which is very close to Cobalt Blue, so I brush painted it on the fuselage and engine nacelles. You can't even see any streaks - it went on beautifully! Testors does not make chrome yellow in a spray can, so I used regular yellow, which is darn close too. The wings are moulded in what appears to be a chrome type yellow, but the plastic was too thin and translucent, so I sprayed them with Testors white primer, then the gloss yellow. The original decals went on beautifully. Interestingly, the Williams Bros. recommend in the instructions using thin colored chart tape for the canopy and blister framework. I had a roll of Pactra blue racing trim tape, so I though I'd give that a try in order to abide by Williams' recommendation. The color of the tape matched the Testors French Blue perfectly, and it looks great. It took a little longer to do than painting, but was worth the effort.
I'm still not a big fan of the B-10B, but I love having this model to round out my collection of Williams Bros. first four model airplane kits in 1/72 scale. Next up - the Northrop Gamma and Curtis C-46 Commando!

Williams Bros. Boeing 247 Makeover

After sitting on my office shelf for a while as a USAAC C-73, looking rather drab in its natural plastic gray, I decided to give my vintage Williams Bros. Boeing 247 a makeover. I wanted her to have the United Airlines markings the kit originally came with. So, I bought a new kit with good decals, removed the Turner racer windshield and installed the airliner one. The paint job was the tricky part. The Williams Brothers recommend an anodized metal surface appearing gray. The problem with this color is, what does it really look like? Photos of early United Boeing 247s before they were painted gloss gray are difficult to determine what the original metal skin surface looked like. In some photos the aircraft appear dark, while others appear light. Turner's racer 247D apparently had the unpainted surface, at least at first, and that is what the box top art shows as well. So I decided to model that using Testors Dark Anodonic Gray, brushed on with a wide sable brush to replicate the grains in the aluminum panels. Then I lightly buffed the surface with a tissue. After that I burnished the metalizer into a nice glossy metallic finish using a Dremel tool with cloth buffing wheel. The trick was to buff the surface hard and fast enough to bring it to a gloss without pushing too hard and melting the plastic. What I like about this method is the surface doesn't require any sealer, because the paint has been rubbed so hard into the plastic, it becomes quite durable. A couple spots are lighter than the rest probably because the paint was brushed on too thin. Next time I do a finish like this I might brush on two coats before power buffing.
I don't know how old the replacement decals are, but they held together during application, and you can't even see the film around them - they're perfect. The ship's interior was already painted French Blue with aluminum seat frames, so no changes were needed there. The airliner cockpit has a rather nasty seam running down the middle, but I wasn't in the mood for filling and sanding during this makeover, so I left it as is. All-in-all, I'm happier with it now, and may in the future build the Turner racer version because I have all the parts and decals for it.

 

Entex 1/100 Douglas DC-3

Here's yet another model airplane I never had as a kid, but studied the box every time I went in to Gemco or Peterson Hobbies. It was cheap enough then; why didn't I buy it? Who knows, but it was really fun to build it almost forty years later.
Entex used Nitto moulds for their North Central/C-47 version marketed here in the U.S. It's very accurate in shape, but some of the pieces had a surprising amount of flash. From at least a foot away, this little DC-3 looks real nice - better than Monogram's more toy-looking DC-3 from the 1950s.
A good friend of mine pointed out to me the model on the box top is actually an Airfix 1/72 C-47 with painted on stripes and "North Central" applied with what might be dry letter transfers or scrap letter decals. Perhaps Entex marketing people were instructed to come up with box artwork before any parts and decals arrived from Japan. At any rate, I was very attracted to that model on the box top because it reminded me of the North American Aviation company DC-3 my Dad used to fly on during the early Apollo days. In fact as I was building this model, my backup plan was if the decals were unusable from age, I would put simple stripes on it to replicate a privately owned DC-3.

To my delight though, the original decals were as good as new. Micro-Sol saved the day as usual with the fuselage stripes around the nose, and over the door handles. The stuff worries me every time because the decals look so wrinkled after application, but the stuff works as advertised - I love it!

 

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.