I grew up near Moffett Field and as a kid always saw the P-3 “sub bombers” flying over my house.  Whenever we drove by we could see the blimp hangers.  The blimps and other airships were long gone by that time but the hangers remain.  I purchased this model from the gift shop in the hanger at Moffett Field that was used by the USS Macon.  More information on the USS Macon can be found on the museum web site at http://www.moffettfieldmuseum.org/history/macon/macon.html.  Unfortunately the museum itself is currently closed due to fire safety issues.

Notice the Sparrowhawks below the USS Macon in this picture. 

The Macon could carry up to five Curtiss F9C Sparrowhawks.  These small aircraft served as scouts and protection for the airship. 

The kit is molded in white plastic with a small clear piece for the windshield, some fishing line for rigging and rubber tires.  There is flash on a lot of parts, sometimes enough to make it hard to tell where the flash ends and the actual part starts.  This is worst on the front of the fuselage.  The few panel lines are raised but very small.  With a few notable exceptions the fit is fairly good.  The worst fitting areas were the wheel pants and the top wing to fuselage.  A lot of filler was used in these areas.  The instructions consist of an exploded overall view and slightly more detailed views of a few areas.  The instructions are not clear on the location of most of the parts.  In most cases a lot of trial and error along with guesswork is needed to figure out exactly where and how everything goes together.  Step by step construction instructions are included but I didn’t follow then too much except to help make sure I didn’t forget anything.  There are also some very nice scale drawings of the plane from the sides and top, bottom and front.  The box art was also very useful.  The July 2000 issue of Airpower magazine was one of my most useful references.  It has a lot of pictures including a color picture of the sole remaining Sparrowhawk.  The decals are very nice except some of the smaller lettering is a little blurred. 

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The individual cylinders and other engine pieces went together nicely, I added some thin lead wire for the plug wires.  The cockpit pieces required a lot of guesswork to figure out where everything went.  There isn’t a lot of detail but it looks like everything is fairly close to where it belongs.  For the instrument panel I photocopied the decal sheet, cut out the instruments and glued them to a piece of .010 plastic.  It took me two tries but I drilled out holes where the instruments are.  Then I put the decal on the panel and the thin piece with the holes over the decal.  The fuselage and wing halves all went together pretty good.  I attached the top wing to the fuselage before painting.  The wheel pants and struts were assembled separately and attached to the fuselage later.  I used a combination of JB Weld epoxy, Squadron green putty, Mr Surfacer 500, lots of sandpaper and elbow grease to get the top wing and wheel pants blended in reasonably smoothly.  From the color pictures it looked like the light gray fuselage was almost the same tone as the aluminum wings.  Looking at my paint supply, Model Master IJN gray looked to be pretty close so that’s what I used.  I had used Polly Scale orange yellow for the top of the wings on other pre-war USN planes since it looks pretty close to the real thing.  In this case I wanted to use gloss colors for everything so I put a few drops of MM guards red into a jar of MM chrome yellow until it was about the same color as the Polly Scale paint.  Guards red is also the red I used for the fuselage band and cowl.  It is a close match for the red in the decals.  SNJ was used for the metal parts.  This is the first time I tried sanding and polishing a gloss paint job.  It came out pretty good and allowed me to get rid of dust specks and blend in touch ups as needed.  After putting the decals on and settled in with Micro-sol I decided that a clear gloss coating wasn’t needed.

Due to questionable molding quality, I scratch built a lot of replacement parts.  These include.  Wing struts made from .030x.080 plastic strips with the corners shaved down to make them more oval in cross section.  The gun sight and windshield are scratch built.  The windshield took several hours over three days to get to my satisfaction.  The propeller blades were cut off and glued into a new hub made from four pieces of metal tubing.  Exhaust pipes are made from aluminum tubing.  The antenna tripods were made from three pieces of copper electrical wire soldered together.  The antennas are .006 fishing line.  The springs on the end of the antenna lines are the outer wrapping from a guitar string. 

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The rigging is also fishing line.  Each line is one piece from one side of the plane to the other.  I drilled out the holes in the fuselage then passed the line through in one side and out the other.  I glued each outer end in place on the wings leaving a lot of slack inside the fuselage.  Then I used a wire hook to reach in from the front and pull each line tight before putting glue on the fuselage rigging hole.  It worked out pretty well but I still had to use a soldering iron to tighten up a couple of the lines.  Fishing line is much stronger than a similar thickness of stretched sprue.

About the only items mentioned in the instructions that I didn’t install were the tailhook and secondary gunsight.  The tailhook was poorly molded and the secondary sight is a scratch build only item.  Since these were not always used on the real planes I don’t feel too bad about leaving them off. 

I’m very happy with the final result but glad it’s over.  Time to build a couple shake n bake kits for relaxation.

Dale