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.

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!