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Showing results for tags 'Lockheed Air Express'.
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I Know exactly what these Merlin kits are: an attempt of Kaos to disrupt the modeling world, to sow utter confusion among unsuspected modelers, to drive Control mad trying to build unbuildable, amorphous lumps of plastic in a vain, futile effort to obtain a model! This "kit" should be a prominent character in one of Poe's or Nathaniel Hawthorne's scary stories, or be in one of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu myths... Oh, the horror... If you have the strength of heart, and can bear it, you may consult the step-by-step Modeling Noire genre story here: Yes, after all that time and inordinate amount of painstaking effort, a not totally indecent model was produced. Was it worth it? Get yourself a Planet Lockheed Air Express (I did after this!) and trash this miserable lump of Merlin plastic if it happened to have sneakily crawled into your stash. Or donate it to a Museum of Horrors, to be displayed aside (or better in) the torture chamber. Or wait -if you don't like resin kits or their prices are not for your modeling budget- until a manufacturer produces these Golden Age beauties in styrene form. One very good thing came of it, though: I commissioned the decal sheet from Arctic Decals (the kit decal sheet was as miserable -and wrong- as the plastic), and it is superb, of exquisite quality. So I now have spare decals for my other Air Express, yippee! I represented the plane as flown by Frank Hawks in the 1929 National Air Tour, as a pathfinder plane for the entrants. Once again I reiterate that this plane went through a large number of modifications in details and marks (some listed on the WIP post), so be careful, if you attempt to model it, with your research, and base it not on drawings, but on photos.- 24 replies
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- Lockheed Air Express
- Merlin Models
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The Case of the Merlin Kit A Dark and Stormy Night Modeling Horror Story From the deepest, murkiest, most haunted black lagoons of modeling history comes this...I hesitate to call it "kit". It is as much as a kit as the Frankenstein Monster is an adorable young human being. Old are its years, obscure its origins, wrapped in shadows the unspeakable method used to create it. It wouldn't be out of place in a séance as an ectoplasmic apparition that would certainly make the hairs of your nape raise. How far should a modeler go to prove that his heart is stout, his hand firm, his will unquenchable? Oh, the humanity. It has been said that Merlin models were given that name because you have to be a wizard to be able to build them. I disagree. You have to be a mad wizard to even want to build one. But suffer one must, it seems, when friends kindly ask you to build their old kits. Sigh... Contents. For what I can see online the engine was lost in transit: "Vintage" decals: Instructions. The correct interpretation is "Mwahhhhaha....MWAHAHAHA....MWAHAHAHAH!!!" One and 4/5ths of a propeller: And those seats don't look that comfortable, if you ask me: The "clear" fuselage. Appropriately murky... A strange composite material, with reinforcement black particles embedded in the plastic (Igor's ashes?): And, just mentioning, there is nowadays the Planet Models Air Express resin kit that is, well, as Lady Galadriel is to an orc. To be continued?
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- Lockheed Air Express
- Merlin kits
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