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Hi all. Since finishing my last efforts a couple of days ago, I decided to do a little update and maintenance work on some oldies that have been laying about the display case, needing some love and attention. One of these happens to be my conversion of the old, original Airfix A4D-1 kit, back-dated and modified to better represent the prototype, on the day of her toll-out. I can't even remember when I first built this model, but has certainly been many years ago. The model itself was sort of simple and crude, and to a much greater extant than now, so was the level of my work upon it. That being said, making the conversion was a joy and a pleasure. In fact, to confess the truth, I still more dearly enjoy cutting up and modifying a kit, than actually completing it! That may be the reason that at least a couple of walls of my kits have been started, but never finished! In any event, this kit had been finished to my "then" standard, but over the years I found that the landing gear legs had been painted white, and should have been metal; the cable cutter (or is it the pitot?) was missing from in front of the windscreen, and so on. I decided to fix some of the errors, but not to redo the whole aircraft to a higher state of modeling. She is what she is, and shall remain mostly as she has been -- a proper marker for the type of models I built long ago, to get to the type of models I build today. She may not be as fancy as today's effort might be, but, I love her still... As to the mods to the original kit, IIRC, I had to add a bit of a "hump" behind the canopy, made of CA cement, and sanded to the correct shape; I had to backdate the aircraft's tailpipe to the original straight-through tube, vs the "sugar-scoop" king of exhaust of the later variants; I had to add the fairings on either side of the horizontal stabilizers where they meet the vertical stabilizer, and of course, add the long "test boom" to the nose. I may have had to do a little work to the rudder, can't remember for certain: Anyway, here she is, gussied-up a little bit, but not all the way: At the roll-out, the serial number and model type were hidden with paper and tape stuck over them, and this is depicted above. And finally, I was amazed to find -- after much research -- that the underside was actually painted like this: As often happens with people of Scotch and Irish descent (my maternal grandmother was a Flynn, and my wife's grandmother was a MacEntegart), we all spend a lot of time around this time of year...reflecting. Here's to old models, old modelers, ...and days of Auld Lang Syne.... Ed