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I dug through the stash and found the Williams Bros Boeing 247 kit. I am not a fan of either scheme in the kit, the racer or flight test article. I will see if I can find some other decal options on the net.

My second place marker is this Unlimited racer "Roto Finish" using the VERY limited run High Planes kit in 1/72. The box, no colour here. The plastic, some white metal and a vacform canopy. A quick inspection reveals some very rough plastic and I feel that I may be raiding a donor mustang for better options. Instructions . Stuart

My entry for this group build, the Martin B-57B Canberra operated by the 8th Bomb Squadron out of Bien Hoa AB and then Da Nang AB in 1964/65. It didn't take the Canberra long to become well-known on the tactical scene and they picked up the call sign 'Yellow Bird' based upon the squadron colours (the sister13th BS were 'Red Bird'). I am building the 1/72nd Italeri B-57B Canberra OOB and it will be finished in aluminium. I will be using the decals from the kit. I will also 'ghost' build a second B-57B which will be in the later SEA camouflage scheme coded as 'PQ'. I am looking for a straight forward build of these kits which I have had in the stash for many years now. Michael. Canberras2 by Ghostbase, on Flickr

It seems that I can’t build Mustangs one at a time. I have previously built four 352nd FG Mustangs at the same time (they’re in the inspiration gallery) and I built two in the last Mustang STGB. The production line will be reopened this time for three aircraft from the 4th FG. Using this decal sheet: I will build Nicholas Megura’s “Ill Wind?” and Ralph Hofer’s “Salem Representative” to join Gentile’s “Shangri La” in the cabinet, while the third build will be a P-51D as Pierce McKinnon’s “Ridge Runner”. These three will give three different finishes, OD over NG, OD over NMF and all NMF. Place holder for now until I’ve completed some other current builds. AW

My latest effort - am quite happy how it turned out. I decided to do a little ekstra in the cockpit area and to dress up the turret a bit. The build was quite uneventfull, allthough the decals was a bit 'challenging'! Thick and demanded a lot of decalsoftener, but it looks alright now - as you would say - a good 3-footer! A couple of things: My reference (B-25 Mitchell in Action and Google) Didn't show any ventral turret on this one. I couldn't find any pictures of the top turret, and Google provided a lot of different types of B-25 turrets, so I went with the - to me - most interesting one, which wasn't painted. I hope you will like it anyway! Cheers Hans J

Hi all, Here is my Tamiya 1/72 Thunderbolt Razorback, a kit that requires little introduction I guess: great fit, with lovely detail all around. I just added a few details (PE seat belts in the cockpit, brake lines on the main landing gear, vacform canopy, brass gun barrels and DF loop antenna on the spine). The drop tank is from a Pavla armament set. The model represents an aircraft from the 1st ACG, that provided close air support and resupply operations to British troops (the so-called "Chindits") that were dropped behind Japanese front lines in Burma. For this "Operation Thursday" aircraft, I used the DP Casper decal sheet. The sheet provides fuselage stripes and theater bands in both dark blue and black. Reading through Squadron's "Thunderbolt in the Pacific Theater", the fuselage stripes are described as dark blue and the bands on wings and tail surfaces in black, so I settled for this combination. First time I used DP Casper's decals: these are very thin and break easily, so care is needed in handling them but they give a nice result. For the NMF I used a few Alclad shades, other paints are mostly Tamiya acrylics. Weathering was done with oils and pigments. Here is a Wikemedia picture of the real thing: United States Army Air Forces, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Credits background picture: freepik, https://www.freepik.com/free-photo/beautiful-scenery-green-tree-forest-cloudy-sky_9185373.htm Hope you enjoy the pictures, thanks for looking! Best regards, Patrick

https://www.scalemates.com/kits/remus-play-kits-messerschmitt-bf109f--177344 I came across one of these while looking for something else on the 'Bay recently and it prompted a few memories. Remus was a pocket money toy range sold in general stores and newsagents. My memory is that they were displayed on one of those rotating racks that were quite common back then. Most of their products were bagged or carded and hung from the arms of the rack. Being in my late teens in the second half of the 1970s, when these toys were most common, you could say I was aware of the brand but not interested in it. That is, until the day I climbed to the first floor of Boots the Chemist in Falkirk and came face to face with a FROG Gladiator. Only it wasn't. Boots used to sell toys, and records for that matter, and what I was looking at was a rack of Remus toys with about half a dozen FROG kits hanging from it. At quite a good price too, as I remember. I didn't buy any then, in fact I've never owned a Remus kit so I don't have any insight into the quality of the parts or the decals. I do know that the company must have commissioned alternative box art as later kits were different from the earlier ones. I wonder what the rest of the story behind these kits is? Anyway, this is a place holder for the time being. I'll post photos and make a start when my La-7 and Airacobra are a bit more advanced. John

This will be my entry in the GB: A look at the sprues: Looks and feels very much like Sword kit. Decals and Master brass pitots: I will be doing the second option with the red diamonds: I wont be starting straight away as I’ve still got builds underway in the Frog Squad and WWII Twins GBs. AW

About a year ago I made a return to model making after a break of almost half a century. The model I chose to start with is a 1/72 scale Short Stirling mkI, which I will complete as N6086, "MacRobert's Reply", LS-F of XV Squadron. I want to display her, at the squadron base at RAF Wyton in Cambridgeshire, being bombed up on the morning of 18th December 1941, for a daylight attack on the battleship Gneisenau in the harbour at Brest. I have made a start by laminating two sheets of 5mm foam board to make a 10mm thick A2 sized base, which I will populate with the Italeri Stirling, a couple of vehicles from the Airfix Bomber Re-Supply set, Flightpath bomb and accumulator trolleys plus whatever figures my painting skills allow. The proverbial blank canvas. I want this to be a fairly quick base build, in contrast to the airframe which has been keeping me occupied for the last nine months, so I'm thinking of using abrasive paper, suitably primed and weathered, to represent the concrete taxiway and scenic scatter material for the grass areas. Anyone who has seen my WiP for the Stirling will know I'm on a steep learning curve and my ideas often run ahead of my current abilities, so we shall see how this turns out. I am already fretting over things like "What size were the concrete slabs that formed the perimeter track at Wyton?" and "How dark a green colour would the grass have been in December?"! I think I'm going with 25' squares for the slabs, based on the 50' width of standard taxiways later in the war and from looking at photographs of aircraft parked at Wyton on the 60s and 70s. As for the grass, I'm going with dark green for winter in East Anglia. More pictures next week! Onwards and Upwards, chaps. Murray

I am a late starter for the GB as I could not decide on my build. So here it is The box contains two kits, one part started and the other untouched, I may do both if I have the space. As you can see I have decals for both QANTAS and the RAAF. I also have another QANTAS sheet for the later ochre cheatline scheme which I am tending towards.

I'm not the first to offer up a Blenheim for this GB and I think this particular Airfix 1/72 boxing has already had an airing as well! But I fancy doing a Fighter variant of the Blenheim, this one was sitting near the top of the stash and so out it has come. I plan on building this one pretty much out of the box. This boxing has decals for BQ-O (L8679), a 600 Squadron aircraft based at RAF Manston in August 1940, but I'm planning on doing this one as a different aircraft on the squadron during that month so I'll be digging out some extra decals. Haven't worked out which exact aircraft I want to do yet; some reading through the Squadron ORBs (AIR-27-2059) and my two main reference works (Gentlemen in Blue by Hans Onderwater and The Bristol Blenheim: A complete history by Graham Warner) is ongoing. I think (hope?) I've got a masking set somewhere...

My last Airfix Mustang in the stash. I found some goodies too. Although the red-tail markings are attractive, I once fell for the luxorious design of these Exito decals, and I somehow need to motivate that expense, so this will be the choice this time: It’s a P51D-25-NA operating as long-range escort out of Iwo Jima towards the end of the war, and since I have 5-, 10 and 15-NA since before it complements the collection. Some tweaks will be needed, regarding radio equipment (I distinctly remember they had a different set of boxes, not to mention the different set of antennas) and tail-warning radar. I now have one week to find that vac form canopy and Quickboost exhaust stacks I remember buying but cannot find. I now understand how squirrels feel.

With a Japanese nightfighter finished, I thought I’d try an allied machine as well. The Blenheim isn’t as popular I thought it would be, so I’ll add a Mk IVF. Maybe I’ll go with the one on the box cover, unless I can scrounge some serials and codes for a plane in navy colours. Or maybe not. Will do some research, found seceral titles on Scribed. The box: I built the old Airfix as a kid and remember struggling - I expect this to be a bit different. The box contains pieces to do a regular Mk. IV as well, so that is another possibility. Assembled the office - will try to paint it all in one piece. I’m masking the lower window to paint it on the inside as well. The rest of the glass house I’ll paint only from the outside. It’s very thick anyway. This is the first Airfix model I’ve seen where the flaps can be left lowered, with moulded structure inside. Thickness of braces is of course widely overscale. Will see what to do. Some internal structure in the wheel houses too: Fit seems good, but the soft plastic has quite rounded edges, which results in trenches where the pieces mate. I expect some filling.

Having been lurking on this forum for quite a few months now, and occasionally adding my own ramblings to other people's topics, I have finally worked up the courage to start a WiP of my own. My main interest is the RAF in WW2, at the moment particularly the aircraft of Bomber Command. So having had a short break from model making, of almost half a century , earlier this year I acquired these: This first post is a bit of a test run to see if my 20th century brain can cope with the 21st century technology of photo-sharing. If it all works I have a back catalogue of photos taken over the last six months or so and I'll be sorting and posting from that, which might give the illusion of amazingly rapid progress. Once I've caught up I'm sure it will become apparent that we should be using the geological time scale to measure my work rate! No proper sprue shots in this thread. I think we all know what they look like and by the time I got myself organised a lot of mine looked like this: That's enough of my waffle, let's hit Submit Topic and see what happens!

I’m just starting this from the stash. 2 queries. 1. The overall colour will be Gunship Gray. It’s as close a match as I can see from various photos on the net and seems oft recommended on here for modern French a/c tho not, so far as I can see, the Alpha Jet. (I had assumed Mirage blue was correct until I saw the photos). Does anyone have any strong evidence against Gunship Gray? 2. I assume the -E was unarmed for most of its service life. It’s even hard to find pictures of it with fuel tanks. Further,the gun pod in the kit seems to be the Mauser rather than the DEFRA . Again, have I got this wrong or were they often carrying ordnance? TIA

visited my (not so) local model shop and got this. I think I’ll stick with one thunderbirds scheme, as I quite like it and even better the kit was only €8.50. I did hedge over a rather nice 1/48 Tamiya kit but it was a whopping €49 and by that I’d already decided to buy a hobby boss VK4502 ( a steal at €35 😀) Work will commence tomorrow!!!

I would like to enter with this please; As well as the Eighth Air Force, I have a very big interest in USAFE, especially those aircraft based in the UK, and in particular the 81st FBW/TFW at Bentwaters/Woodbridge. Must have had something to do with all those A-10s we saw flying over our campsite in Suffolk in the 80s and early 90s! Between diecast and plastic kits, I'd like to get a model of each of the main types operated from the twin bases. Regarding the Thunderstreak, they weren't actually flown by the 81st for that long, from 1954 to 1958, but their introduction brought a change of role to the 81st from air defence to tactical nuclear strike. They were replaced by F-101 Voodoos. My kit was bought, appropriately enough, from Bentwaters Cold War Museum in 2017, on their 10th anniversary open day. A couple of years ago, I finally managed to get a set of Microscale decals for Bentwaters Thunderstreaks, which came from France and cost more than the kit! So, here are the sprues. Some pieces have become detached, but they are all there; Instructions; And here is the Microscale decal sheet. They look very eye catching, although that is a lot of stencils too! I think I will be going for the red markings from the 78th Fighter-Bomber Squadron "Bushmasters". The decal instructions aren't great; So, I had a look on Scalemates, and downloaded the instructions for the Hobby Boss 1/48 version which has the same markings; I quite fancy picking up a cheap Airfix F-84F, which would enable me to do a double build, and compare it directly to the Italeri kit, and it would also let me use the 91st FBS markings too! I'll see what I can find, but I'd like to get some progress on this one first!

Hello everybody, This year's theme for my local club display will be the Lockheed Shooting Star in its many incarnations, so my carefully planned Group Builds for 2024 were totally upset by the new priority. I set to work immediately and only later thought that my first choice would nicely fit in the rules of this GB, so let's start with the kit box: This is the very first issue of the Heller kit going back to the early '80s. I got it new to build the Thunderbirds scheme, though the decals were a disappointment and it remained in the stash for some time (40+ years!). Now it was finally time to build it! I have an Xtradecal sheet for multiple countries and will use the Luftwaffe part, this was the starting shot: Thanks for looking!

A two-for-one with this post. I was given two of the same Heller kits (from 1993) and told I could have them for free if I returned one in its completed state. As with any Heller kit I've made, there was no issue in part fitting and the only (minor) issue was that the decals had to soak for a little longer than usual. The Polish version is painted in Vallejo's Model Air line (a brand of paints I've had almost exclusively bad results with) in German Braunviolet, and the Romanian in AK's Real Colors' Grau (1941). I haven't been able to find any colour photos of the olive drab that Poland painted their planes in, but I've read that it was very similar to the Luftwaffe's Braunviolet (which on its own is hard to track down a match for). This is also my first attempt at making a staging setup for my photos. At the time of this photo, it was a work-in-progress, and it remains so. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Polish PZL.23 Karaś, (translated as the Crucian Carp) was a light bomber and reconnaissance plane. Another two-for-one post, this time one is done in the Polish paint scheme and decals (drab) and the other in those of the Royal Romanian Air Force (olive and yellow). The Karaś was produced after the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-21 after the importance of aerial reconnaissance became evident. A new light bomber was also required, so PZL combined the two roles into the Karaś. At the time of its production, it was quite advanced, but the 1930s saw rapid improvements in aviation, so it was nearly considered obsolete by 1939 and the outbreak of the Second World War. At the time of Germany's invasion of Poland, the Karaś was Poland's primary light bomber and recon craft. It was a single Karaś that conducted the first bombing raid on a German factory on September 2nd, and columns of Karaś bombers were responsible for taking out nearly 30% of invading land vehicles. Unfortunately, they had minimal fighter support and their light armour ensured that they suffered heavy losses. After Poland's capitulation, many of the remaining Karaś craft were shipped to Romania to use against the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa.

Here all. Here is my recently completed build of a Savoia-Marchetti S.55 Torpedo Bomber of the Regia Aeronautica Italiana using the Dora Wings kit in 1/72 and was built as part of the World War 2 Twins GB. Built out of the box with only a figure and rigging added and mounted on a sea base. Build log here: This thing is big for me, taking the space of 4-6 of my 'normal' sized subjects... Stuart

Although the Wallace was fine, after the trouble I had with the Shark both in terms of the wing struts and also the poor location points, I am a bit hesitant to try another biplane but as this is the last viable Frog kit I have I will give it a try - I have a Sea Fury and Master that I have been using for spares and a Gloster Whittle that is so inaccurate that I can't be bothered making it until I am desperate for something to build. It is a Donetsk Toy Factory offering which I bought many years ago, but fortunately in this instance they seem to have been rather better at moulding the plastic than they were with the blurry box art! There is not a lot of flash for once, likewise ejector pin marks, and all the bits are there and intact except for the "axle" pins on the landing gear legs which have broken off. That is not a problem anyway as I have decided that I will build it as a pre-war floatplane. This will be the 4th Swordfish I have built starting with the ancient and not very good original Airfix offering from about 1958, followed by a Matchbox one and another of the Frog kits, all with wheels. As you can see Frog went for the "frame" type strut arrangement this time which should be a lot easier, although that can cause a slight problem in terms of appearance with the non prototypical horizontal troughs and frames, but a bit of work with a file should minimise the visual impact. Also, there is not as much rigging as I expected as, other than one wire from the cabane struts to the inner wing struts, only the outer bay and the floats will need a full set of wires. Another reason why I decided to risk it is that I have found 2 sets of original Frog decs for the floatplane version. This will be OOB except for the cockpit interior and the forward firing gun which Frog missed, and an Aeroclub Lewis for the rear seater - it seems that both the Lewis and Vickers K were used and I am not entirely sure what the kit part is meant to represent - probably a Lewis! If I am lucky it may end up looking a bit like this one from the Cocardes Frog site. Though with rather less extra detail added! Pete

The Northrop F-89 Scorpion is an all weather twin-engined interceptor designed and produced by the American aircraft manufacturer Northrop. It was the first jet powered aircraft to be designed for the Interceptor role from the outset to enter service,as well as the first combat aircraft to be armed with air-to-air nuclear weapons in the form of the unguided Genie rocket. First flew in 1948 and entered service in 1950. For this GB, I plan to build Revell’s 1/72 F-89D/J kit. I will be finishing it as the aircraft shown on the boxart, a F-89D from 61st Fighter Interceptor Squadron from Ernest Harmon AFB, New Foundland, 1957. Why this one? I like the look of the aircraft with the large wingtip rocket pods (containing a 104 ‘mighty mouse’ FFAR rockets) and more importantly it has a big smiley face on it.

After lurking on and off since lockdown, this GB was the final thing that persuaded me to sign up, as I've had a photoreconnaissance Spitfire on my wish list for a while. Hopefully I'm not too late to the party! I don't get a lot of time to do modelling as I've got two pretty busy jobs (one as an Army Reservist), and two young children, as well as trying to get a home office sorted for my other half and finish decorating and upgrading the house from the move two years ago. I do occasionally get some time when working from home and sat in on meetings where I need to listen more than contribute... I've gone for a KP PR Mk.XI; it's my first experience of a KP kit and from first glance, I'm impressed. The mouldings are crisp and the shape looks good, confirmed through a quick comparison with an Airfix Mk.I, though I haven't measured it against a set of drawings - ultimately, it looks like a Spitfire without any major oddities like the slightly-too-fat Academy Mk.XIV. I'll probably be doing the 541 Sqn version with full invasion stripes as on the box art, although I may do the 400 Sqn RCAF version with underside stripes only. First steps are going to be the initial painting of the interior parts, which I might be able to get done today...

First post here, here's my most recent diorama. The base is made from ceramic coasters, styrofoam and air-drying clay. The sunflowers are actually pre-painted photoetch by Eduard, and the large green bushes are pre made. Otherwise it's mostly scratch built. The kubelwagen is made by S-model, and all the figures are from Preiser. Included a couple of work-in-progress shots of them at the end. I made this diorama/vignette base to display several different models, so the vehicles and soldiers not glued in place. The figures have stakes under their feet so they can also be moved around. Here's the whole dio, in my hand! I linked them from my Reddit profile, hope it works!

Hello all. Here’s my latest from the shed, not my usual fare, but a change is as good as a rest they say. The SR.A/1 jet flying boat fighter concept was brought about because of the success of Japanese water borne aircraft during WW2. In 1943 the Air Ministry funded the development of three Saunders Roe designed aircraft which were completed after the war had finished. The first flight being in 1947. After evaluation the aircraft was not deemed capable of matching the performance of land based aircraft and was not ordered. Two of the aircraft crashed during testing and were lost. The pilot of one was rescued by the occupant of a support launch who dived into the water fully clothed after the aircraft suffered a landing accident. He pulled the pilot free from the cockpit of the sinking aircraft saving his life. That pilot was Eric ‘winkle’ Brown who became one of the most famous test pilots of the time. The kit was typical short run, taking a bit of work to get it together. I replaced the supplied flimsy PE nose grill with silver nickel rod, other than that it was built from the box. It was finished in a mixture of Humbrol 27001 and 27002 and sealed using Xtra color varnishes. The base is from coastalkits. A nice change from the norm I enjoyed the challenge of this build. Here are a few pics, hope you like it. Thanks for looking. Pete