bianfuxia

The pain continues! The underside wing markings also broke - the serial number on the right side only broke neatly into two, but the red circle and JAS combo on the left fragmented into multiple parts. But the worst was the rest of the rainbow pattern 🙄 It broke into several more parts getting it from the paper to the model!

Thanks for the bump! I think once people get into the Post War Twins build later this year and have the predicted high levels of enjoyment with it, this proposal will get a lot of support. Personally - and in blatant breach of my "not buying more kits this year" pledge (why do we bother with these resolutions we know we're going to ignore?) - I now have three extra 1/200 747s for this, along with a Shackleton, a C-133, a KC-135 and at least 2 C-130s.....plus who knows what else sitting in my never-shrinking stash!

Well...all I can say is I hope your decal sheet performs better than mine has! The first few went on ok, although I could see already that there'd be difficulties with the larger one. And I was right. Here it is with the wings prepped and painted with silver. They're done now, once I touch up a little here or there. The main fuselage scheme is one enormous decal. I knew enough to cut it in half and the rainbow section went on reasonably well (got a bit burnt by Mr Mark Softer though). The green stuff was total chaos - I applied that as a separate decal and it was more or less a disaster. That green section is made up now of about 20 smaller random chunks. I liken it to brash ice in the Antarctic - chunks of small ice floating on the surface. Imagine trying to put them all into place - you move one, the rest move, you move another back, some others move. And each time you touch anything it breaks into smaller pieces. This is the best I can do. Let's see how it looks after (a lighter coat) of Mr Mark Softer does its work. I'll have to wait until that's really dried because over the top of all this I then need to add the windows and doors. So...for the other three kits I will definitely not be using any of the kit decals. I hadn't actually planned to anyway - I thought I'd do one in Iceland Express markings and I was planning to use some parts of one kit to try to convert my DC-9 to a B717...not sure what to do with the fourth one.

If it says U. S. AIR FORCE on the side of the plane in big all-caps writing, it's in. If it doesn't, then it isn't.

Such a great contribution to the GB - thank you! It's inspiring. I hope you are able to paint it and put the pics here because I am sure many of us would be keen to see that!

Big thanks to you, too, you were a great defacto co-host!

Ninety-one entries in the gallery! Amazing. What a great GB! Thank you SO MUCH to all who participated - whether your build finished or is still to come. Such a diverse and incredible catalogue of subjects and modelling skill. Everyone's enthusiasm has been heart-warming! By my count we had: 21 cars Three (count them!) tractors Four vans/trucks Two motorbikes/scooter A beautiful sailing ship A lovely ocean liner Three life boats 17 light or smaller aircraft 15 airliners 5 rotorcraft (helos, autogiros, rotodynes) A hovercraft Two trains - a little loco and a brake coach Nine different types of building from the Suzhou Imperial Gardens to locomotive facilities to a building site Space subjects including the ISS, rockets, and the 2001 clipper An incredible robot in the digital garden of Eden A wonderful relief of a bird in a tree; and Neville Chamberlain! I think I've covered everything - apologies if not. Four pages of gallery but I think I checked everything carefully. And I don't know that I've ever seen such a wide-ranging GB gallery in the 5 or so years I've been participating in them. So THANK YOU all and in a few years let's try it again!

You've achieved a fantastic result, congratulations! Persistence paid off! When you think that in 1969 this probably was a prospect by 2001, if things had taken a few different roads, and now in 2025 it feels impossible that in 2057 (32 years, the same timeframe) we will be flying ships like this to an orbital Hilton ... Great build and I'm so glad you stuck with it!

After the first coat of base white, I added the wings, masked them off, and gave it another shot or two of base white over the course of the weekend - cheating abit by not leaving it as long as I probably ought to have. Then when I thought I could get away with it, I gave it a coat of Pure White (TS-26). I was still set on getting it across the line by the gallery deadline, but the first few decals proved that the sheet's age means it won't be anywhere near as easy and fast as the ANA -800 was. They take a lot longer to come off the paper and they're quite fragile. I've done a few minor ones on the T-tail plus the windows up front and the JAS sign on the tail...that took as long as doing one whole side of the other airliner with its much newer decals. The wing paint is more complicated on this one, too. Some grey and a lot of silver as you can see in the instruction diagram there. So this is where I will leave this one tonight (about 11pm in my part of the world). Ten hours to go but of course it's a "school night" so my day gets moving at high speed at about 7am...so I can't really pull an all-nighter on this and still get through the week! I'll probably finish this up over the next couple of nights - would have been nice to get it in the gallery but better to finish it carefully than muck it up by rushing.

Well done! It looks great. Thank you for participating and don't forget to put it in the gallery!

I agree - put him in the gallery. Nothing says "Give Peace a Chance" like him. OK, we know how it turned out, but I don't think anyone really disputes he was trying to avoid a war. In any event, as AdrianMF says, it's a great bit of modelling, that figure, so it deserves to go in there.

Listen to the other part! Don't trash it! What's in the pics so far is really excellent work. So wait and see before you decide the next step.

Looking forward to it, good luck!

Excellent work and a great little catch up burst there at the end. It looks excellent and I think you can be very pleased with how it turned out. Great job and thank you for participating!

And....finished. Some more photos when the sun comes out.

This is all I have to show so far - complicated headlight set up. I've also done some more work on the interior. Somehow like an idiot I have mislaid the steering wheel. WTH? I did a big tidy up of the work bench ahead of this weekend so I could really focus on the builds for this GB but for love nor money is that wheel to be found. I did another blast of orange so the body is looking pretty decent. Anyway, I will keep going on this tonight and see how we go.

Here's my Boeing 737-800 in 1/200 from Hasegawa, flying in ANA colours.

This one is looking very nice - a beautiful smooth and glossy coat of paint you've acheived!

Looks like more than a weekend's worth of sanding here mate! Also - quite the collection of Starfighters in the background.

Great work - saw it in the gallery and it looks excellent! With these kits, are they intended to actually run on someone's layout, and someone would build a whole train's worth of different coaches? Or are they more for display? Thank you for bringing this very interesting and unusual subject into the GB!

Excellent work! So glad to see this one about to cross the line!

Well, it's been a great build so far and I wish you the best with completing it - I hope you come back and finish the thread! Thank you for participating so far!

74 separate models in the gallery with about 36 hours to go - and all of them amazing. I can see several more have a chance of getting across the line, too!

A very fine model, excellent work! As I mentioned before, amazing photography as well. A very clean and neat build. Congratulations and thanks for participating!

Well i think it looks great - the pinstriping around the forward red part looks very neat. Looking forward to seeing it in the gallery, where it will find its rightful place among the multiple other bright red and yellow subjects! You've done a fine job of this and thank you for participating!