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In 1971 we moved up from Suffolk to Whitby in North Yorkshire with my father's RAF posting. Across the road from the RAF Married Quarters was Stakesby Stores which was a grocers shop and Post Office. It also sold a few FROG kits. High up on a shelf were the biggest 1/72 FROG model kits I had ever seen at the age of eleven, one was the Renzan bomber and the other was a B-47 Stratojet. The FROG Stratojet had a fabulous painting of a Stratojet refuelling from a tanker aircraft high above the clouds as if viewed from the refueller boom operator's window. A few years later I realised that these FROG kits were in fact Hasegawa models repackaged by FROG. The first clue was when my sister bought me a FROG Mohawk for my birthday and it had a little sticker on the box stating it was moulded in Japan. Then for my thirteenth birthday dad bought me a FROG Kawanishi Emily with a lovely painting of one taking off on the box front and the inspiring FROG painting guide on the back in full colour. Then the penny dropped when the Stratojet, Renzan and Emily as well as the Mohawk appeared in my 1975 Hasegawa catalogue. I have always loved the Stratojet but it is only recently that I acquired one. I would really have liked a FROG one but these are rare and pricey. So I bought a later issue of the Hasegawa one. This is the boxing that I have. There have been quite a variety of earlier boxings and artworks. I started my Stratojet about two years ago and decided to scratch build the cockpit compartment. This became quite involved and the fuselage interior was well in progress when I just became bored with it. A big but simple kit was just taking me too long. So everything I had made and fabricated up to then went back in its box where it remained until now. At a recent model show a fellow Club member Kevin surprised me when he returned to our table with a new Stratojet kit under his arms and then suggested that three of us display Stratojets at a show in June. Kevin will be building his with a Pavla resin cockpit and he likes to use alclad finishes. Tony has one he built a number of years ago which is completely brush painted and knowing Tony it will be an unusual version. And mine will have a home-made cockpit and be sprayed from a can. So we should end up with three quite different models of the same kit. So the contract has been signed with Boeing for the building of a B-47E by the AM Aero Works...............now I need an extension to my model table