ajmm

I know - bizarre looking thing isn’t it! Necessity is the mother of invention and all that. Thanks! Sure is. F-Rsin kit. Pretty rough and there’s no way in all that’s holy that I’ll be doing it in natural metal. But it should brush up nicely I hope. They’re quite handsome aircraft. Anyway - thanks very much! Thanks for the kind comments @Wulfman and @SAT69!

Thank you so much for the kind comments @CJP @dnl42 @busnproplinerfan - they are greatly appreciated. Thanks! Oh that scheme was nice - I was tempted by that and will look out for yours! I haven't tried the EC-135 yet but yes I can see what you mean about it looking a bit off up front now. The Minicraft Connie looks good once you get there and I'm sure you'll do a cracking job. In fairness I tried mine when I'd only just got back into the hobby and I doubt I did it justice. There seemed to be a rash of Revell C-121s on eBay over here lately so I picked up a few for notalotofmoney. Ah interesting, thank you! Yes that would make sense. Oddly I only really discovered the historical context as I was doing this and became enthralled with the subject (one of the things I love most about this hobby). Thank you - that's very kind of you. Yes, that's definitely on the shortlist. I have the Welshmodels conversion and got it out of the stash the other day so it's a question of when not if. I think it will marry up to the Revell fuselage quite nicely. Worth looking that up by the way if you don't want to butcher those increasingly rare and expensive Orions @busnproplinerfan Also - glad to see someone else is a fan of Old Machine Press - one of my favourite parts of the internet - I often retreat there on a lunch break in the office (and emerge several hours later!). Brilliantly informative articles - I'm finishing a 1:144 Beech XA-38 Grizzly and the OMP article has been invaluable as well as fascinating. Another one I want to build is the EC-121L with the mushroom dome on top - I have the RVHP conversion for that. Ahhh. So many projects, so little display space! Well thank you for making such great decals! They really are outstanding in quality and the breadth of subjects on offer (you probably get tired of hearing it!). Can't wait for the Orion, Hustler and Peacemaker!

Transport aircraft design can throw up some of the most dreary and downright ugly aircraft but I think the dolphin-backed Constellation has to be the most elegant and graceful - even with a beer belly and shark fin! This is the naval version of the early-warning Connie, the WV-2 Warning Star. These aircraft ploughed up and down each American coastline for up to 20 hours at a time, usually below 6,000 feet (very much 'in the weather'), 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This helped provide a radar barrier or 'picket line' to warn of incoming Soviet bombers or - as was feared at the time - paratroopers. Missiles weren't so much of a bother just yet. These missions could be anything but pedestrian. Take this (actual) flight report from a Willy Victor commander: Proper pilot stuff that - love it. The commander was part of VW-13 - this model represents an example from this squadron. VW-13 was established in 1955 and helped comprise the Atlantic Barrier (BARLANT) force. It was based formally at NAS Patuxent River in the late-1950s and early-1960s, but in reality it often called NAS Argentia in Newfoundland home, and roamed to and fro across the Atlantic fairly frequently (there are some great photographs taken in Glasgow). Weather in Newfoundland was diabolical - the norm in winter was a 600' ceiling and visibility less than 1.5 miles. Argentia itself is very exposed, and colossal near hurricane-force crosswinds could often be expected on landing (many of which were made on instruments almost the whole way down). The accounts of the ice build up are astonishing - on a 15 hour barrier flight, one Connie staggered home with ice on the underside of the wings one foot thick in places! Fascinating, gutsy flyer stuff - shot through with skill and courage. Anyway. This is the Revell kit, kitbashed with a Minicraft Connie picked up for a fiver on eBay. I know some on here have been able to fashion great things from the Minicraft Connie. Alas I did once try to build a Minicraft constellation but found the experience so miserable and unrewarding I promised myself never to do it again. After plundering the parts I needed for this build from the Minicraft kit and using a few spares on other projects, I'm afraid I just binned the rest of it. The Revell kit is superb. The fit is basically really good (wing fuselage join needs a bit of attention) and detail is excellent (yes, panel lines are a little deep, but I'll forgive that given the lack of alternatives). The only problem with the Revell kit is that it is the passenger transport version - so you have to fill, sand and rescribe a fair bit to lose the passenger windows. Not as big a chore as I feared, but the first time I've done this. The Minicraft radomes fit fine with no real problem - the bottom one is a bit tricky to get right. The top radome is actually much too thin in plan, but I didn't amend this. I just won't look at it from directly ahead! Paint was Hataka as usual. I have the Caracal Decals sheet which offers lots of enticing EC-121 and WV-2 schemes. I went for this fairly plain WV-2 scheme as I want ultimately to do all of these schemes (yup - yet another ludicrously ambitious plan). This being the first conversion I'm doing, I wanted a fairly simple and forgiving scheme to learn the pitfalls for something more complex next time. Still, it's pretty handsome, I think, and the scheme is faintly nostalgic for me as the Minicraft kit I did build before was a VW-13 aircraft. Oddly the Caracal decals, which are otherwise excellent, only offer one set of the three white stripes on the nose - but I did manage to find some others from the Minicraft decals. Also the wing walkway is incorrect. I made half an attempt to correct it but it should have another box towards the leading edge between the nacelles. But they behave superbly and couldn't be recommended more highly. These got very worn-looking towards the end of their life in service (see the aerial photo above). I did some weathering with pastels and pencils, but tried to keep myself under control. I don't know what it is about transport aircraft from this period but painting the props is always a royal pain! Anyway - glad I made the effort. (By the way I went for yellow tips for an early WV-2 - in the late-1950s these were repainted with red-white-red tips as you can see on most photos in this post). I also added a multitude of tiny aerials which was quite satisfying actually. Unsurprisingly the radio antenna locations changed quite a lot so it's worth checking your references quite carefully if you're into getting this more or less right. I think what impresses me about the Constellation is its size. It was designed to be high off the ground so that its engines could turn massive propellers at fairly low revs giving it superb range and fuel economy (relatively speaking - it's hardly a Prius...). I've seen one flying at Duxford and they are much bigger than they look from a distance. And finally with something almost completely unrelated - but a transport. Thanks very much for looking. Angus Niche side note: the USN vs. USAF naming is confusing and took me a little while to decypher. The WV-2 (or Willy Victor) was the same as the USAF's EC-121D, but later versions of the WV-2 were fitted with a more sophisticated radar, making them the equivalent of the EC-121K even if the naval name didn't change. Just on the off chance anyone is taking part in an aircraft designation pub quiz over the weekend.

Very nice!

Wow. That is stunning! That nose undercarriage bay? 😮

One of the best Concordes I’ve seen. A beauty - does justice to the original.

Outrageous levels of skill on show here.

Thanks David! Now you mention it - there is a whiff of PBY about it. I think it looks a lot like the Marlin too. I'm curious though - this followed the Tradewind - so advanced in so many ways. A lot about this feels quite a step back - noticeably the radial engines - was that because the demands of the mission were very different so turboprops were overkill do you think? Anyway, Anigrand are shortly going to release the Submaster by the way - so I'll aim to do that soon. Thank you @Pete in Lincs and @keefr22! I've since been formally banned from wearing nautical knitwear at home by my wife and children. I've also been told to replace all the red light bulbs and stop shouting 'ALARM - DIVE, DIVE' at mealtimes. Well we must all get through lockdown somehow.

Thank you all so much for the kind comments - it’s greatly appreciated! Thank you.

@Natter@SAT69@swralph @Vinnie Thank you all very much for the kind comments - it’s always greatly appreciated. Haha - this made me laugh - it’s certainly nothing if not niche. Thanks@Herb

I hope this is the right place to post this - I cannot see a What If section, and weird though this is it is not Sci-Fi! Please do move it if not. I don't post many of my builds on here but this is a bit of a rare kit and aircraft so I thought I'd share it (apart from anything else, despite searching the ends of the internet I can find no images of completed models of this aircraft in any scale so this might help the one other human on this planet who might want to build this kit!). This was a genuine but unbuilt anti-submarine patrol seaplane from Convair. It kind of looks like a Martin Marlin on acid, I think. Either way - it's damned ugly. If this had entered service, I think there's good money on it being called the pelican (in fact, half way through this build I realised what it reminded me of - Nigel from Finding Nemo!). Info on this design is very scarce but I managed to track down some decent three view drawings (Secret Projects Forum has a lot of helpful info if anyone is looking for it). The history of this aircraft is intriguing. In 1957 Mother Russia decided to fit SCUD missiles to their Zulu class submarines, giving the Soviets their first ballistic missile subs. This caused great alarm in the US, and a strong fear that the existing sub picket lines on the Atlantic and Pacific needed upgrading. So an aircraft was sought to replace the Martin Marlin and Lockheed Neptune - the designs of both were nearing ten years old. Both Convair and Martin submitted proposals (XP6Y-1 and XP7M-1 respectively), with two prototypes of the Convair aircraft ordered before budget cuts forced the navy to see sense and decide on a long range land-based aircraft which ably fulfilled this role until only a few years ago - the Lockheed P3 Orion, of course. The idea was this would fly along, land - dunk its sonar and sit for a few hours waiting for a Russian sub to amble past. Spare a thought for the unbelievably seasick sonar operators in the back! It would then take off and repeat the exercise somewhere else. To actually hunt the sub, it would have flown a similar pattern as the Orion subsequently did and use its extendable MAD boom at the rear to fix the sub's position before dropping depth charges or homing torpedoes. Here's the small scale model that was built in 1958: It's only as I put this together that I've really appreciated what a whacky thing this was. The whole design was centred on reducing the stall speed in order to enable this to land and take off in short distances in any sea state the Atlantic or Pacific might throw at it. So it had absolutely massive 'blown' flaps suspended from a flying wing - like a Catalina in a way, just less aircraft and more scaffolding. The height of the wing would presumably have kept the flaps out of the spray on takeoff. To power it off the water, the aircraft was designed with five (5) engines - and a rocket. The three massive Wright R-3350s in the nacelles are obvious, but the central nacelle also housed two jet engines which could be angled over 150 degrees up or down (although quite why you'd want to angle it up I don't know). There was also a JATO rocket in the rear just in case none of this was really enough oomph for you. This would have been able to carry a colossal array of weapons - I was puzzling over what looked like two massive cargo doors in the side of the model amidships (I feel very nautical when I say words like amidships - after this, I must go and don some chunky knitwear and gaze thoughtfully at the middle distance). Actually these were bomb and torpedo bays which rotated through 180' when needed. Similar to the Canberra bomb bay arrangement. The Navy actually liked the design quite a lot - more so than its competitor the Martin Submaster (of which a partial, full-scale mockup was actually built). It ordered two prototypes built before budget cuts led to these being cancelled. Anyway - history aside, there's a WIP in a thread here on Kampfgruppe144 if you're interested. This was largely built out of the box, but I had to source beaching gear from the spares box (these came from a Constellation) and a few other bits and bobs were scratch built like the searchlight. The paint scheme is entirely speculative but I have gone for how I imagined the first prototype (147206) might possibly have looked when it rolled out of Convair's San Diego factory for the top brass - painted in the contemporary white over seaplane grey that Marlins wore, complete with dummy depth charges. I borrowed quite a lot of paint ideas from pictures of the Marlin - especially the props. I don't usually love What If aircraft but there was something fairly liberating doing this knowing there was no prototype let alone production aircraft to base this on. It is surprisingly large. It's not often in modelling in 1:144 that you can fit the entirety of your smartphone camera underneath the wing of the aircraft you're photographing! I say surprisingly, because it was only when I finally put the wing and fuselage assemblies together properly last night that I really appreciated this properly. Quite noticeable next to the Sikorsky Dreadnought I built last year... And particularly so next to what would have been a contemporary naval fighter (even if the Cougar was fairly petite). thank you very much for looking and for reading if you made it this far! Angus p.s. I'd be very surprised if another one of these appears on this forum anytime soon. If one does, I promise to eat my airbrush!

This is stunning! The paint job is faultless.

Oh dear. I’m going to want some of those.

Oh interesting. I’ve got one and will be interested to see how it builds up. Im embarking on an imminent home renovation project - your bench picture is much more inspirational in that direction than the various photos of fabric swatches, paint colours and bathroom furniture that I’ve been obliged to peruse lately! I shall look those up.

This thread has been hugely informative and useful - thank you. Separate but related - does anyone know (or want to take a guess) what colour the Westland-Sikorsky Dragonflies that France bought for use in Indochina in 1952 were? From what I can tell, these were WS.51 Mk.1As - i.e. were neither the HC.4s nor odd HR.5 that were used in Malaya (I had wondered whether they had been bought in theatre and delivered to Indochina from Malaya - apparently not). They were camouflaged - the LF model instructions say Ocean Grey and Dark Green (which anyway cannot be quite right if Ocean Grey was scrapped in 1945). There are no colour photos that I can find but - superficially at least - the actual pattern of the camouflage closely resembles that used by the contemporary RAF HC.2s/4s - which makes me think they were painted in the UK, not in France after delivery. If so, then it is at least possible they were in the same scheme as contemporary RAF Dragonflies were painted. What are the odds of the French order being delivered in Dark Earth/Dark Green camo? Any info would be very helpful - thanks!

Very feasible. There’s also a nifty little kit of a Fouga Magister which I could do in Katanganese colours. Too much choice. Either way, Im a compulsive devourer of audiobooks as I make models (I tried Netflix and models but I just kept glueing fingers together!) so I’ll have to re-play The Dogs of War...

Hi Col Please may I play? I’ve not done a GB before on BM but Africa is right up my street. I build 144 things so I hope that won’t be an issue. I’m keen to do something used by Mad Mike Hoares mercenaries in the Congo in 64. Or I have a SAAF Cheetah somewhere that I should really have a crack at. Or a Sudanese Provost. Basically I have loads of eligible builds. I just need to be a big boy not attempt them all...! Angus

To add - I have this book and it is very eloquently written as the reviewer says and was invaluable in a recent build of an XPBS-1 and proving even more so in a current build of a VS-44. Well worth the reasonable price.

That looks very predatory - almost like a winged leopard. I would be terrified of that if I were a bomber command crew. Very nicely done, as ever.

Ive followed this build and know how much work went into this - and it shows. Amazing. What a transformation from the F-Toys kit.

Very nice! Lovely work.

Outstanding. Great kit but you’ve done an exceptional job with it.

Thank you Kapam, that’s very kind of you to say.

Thank you all very much. 😀 Very kind of you.

Nice! I’m going to start mine soon. Thanks for the tip. Any other pitfalls?