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A friend of mine gave me an old Williams B-10. Azur just came out with the version I wanted to build, but this one is free. I have a current interest in the early air war in the Pacific. The Dutch had over 130 B-10’s of various versions and used them in combat with the Japanese. I will build it in Dutch camo. I have been working on this for awhile and it will take a few post to catch up to where I am now.

I like the Martin B-10, from the age of 8 or so when I was given a book about the history of the US Air Force. It had some pictures of a tour of Alaska by a flight of them which looked way ahead of anything else at the time. It would have been fantastic if the pics had been colour; I assume then they would have been olive green/brown with yellow wings; later in the 30’s the USAAC went for blue fuselages – and highly polished gloss finish too. Whatever the colour scheme the B-10 was the state of the art on introduction, influenced most of the turreted bombers of WW2 and indeed was still in front line service in the Dutch East indies during the war, though pretty much obsolete by then. At the spring FAA Museum show a couple of years ago I picked up this leprous box from a pile. The vendor assured me it wasn’t contagious, was fully complete and the decals had been stored separately. It looked okay and for ten quid what could go wrong – new boxings are still available but 3 times the price and I bet you don’t get the coloured plastic nor is it likely to be as crisply moulded. What did I get? One sprue each of yellow and blue plastic, a clear sprue, a stand (hooray – but no crew - boo) and optional rubber tyres! And a set of very nice microscale decals. Whilst the parts don’t have many joining locators it is obvious that Williams put a good effort into designing an uncomplicated and robust kit. Assembly was fairly straight forward and the parts matched up reasonably well. It may not be an ideal beginners kit but certainly no harder than some older mainstream products. I probably should have scraped the trailing edges internally to try to get them somewhat thinner. The wings virtually plugged into the root fairings forming a good solid airframe, especially with the two stabilizers interlocking in the tail. Having assembled the basic air frame, and before painting I needed to decide how to tackle the transparencies. Given the “not-painting-them-at-all-method” occasionally adopted in my youth is unacceptable at IPMS Romsey I would have to mask. Unfortunately the framing is only dimly etched on the inside of the canopies so I cut some thin tape and set to…and failed, there’s too much intersecting glazing. Plan B was to create some painted magic tape frames which would be sealed in with Klear. That failed too so I just hand brushed. One day I may have another go, but generally once I‘ve finished a kit it stays finished. Having primed in grey to check the build was up/down to my usual standard, it was time to tackle the yellow paint, so I primed the wings white just for a base to these areas. Apart from the usual trauma of yellow paint coverage, this was reasonably straightforward, especially as I had the correct USAAC blue in a bunch of “Xtracolor” paints picked up from one of those piles of old paint giveaways at a club night! Even the yellow, an ancient Humbrol Authentic worked, though needless to say after the first coat I realised I’d forgotten to install the slats(?) between the fuse and nacelles. The Microscale decals went on beautifully, especially as this was my first use of the Microsol/set method (I previously used Humbrol Decalfix 1 & 2 which seemed to do precisely…nothing). I’ve got a feeling the black areas (walkways?) around the engine nacelles should be touching the blue but at least I got them reasonably symmetrical. The built model provided my first certificate (but not 1st place I should add) in the club’s annual completion at Christmas 2015, presumably the other members were blinded by the shiny yellow wings and entered the B-10 on their judging form by accident! Anyway, now I’m sort of getting somewhere with Flickr I thought it would be worth uploading to the forum. Cheers Will