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Well here is it, the dreaded
Maquette (Frog) B-17E.
I couldn't pass the kit up, after finding it on the Internet for 9 bucks. I
was searching for a B-17E after reading a story about the roll of the B17's in
the Battle of Midway Atoll.
Then shortly after the purchase of this kit, the "Back to the Box
Challenge" was posted on the ARC discussion board. This kit sounded as a
perfect candidate for that build.
The building of the kit went OK, the fit of the wings to the fuselage was
pretty ugly. I applied model cement heavily to that area, then cut the dried
excess down & filed/sanded it smooth.
There is no molded detail to
the landing gear, wheels & tires.
The 2 small upper windows that go between the cockpit & nose were missing,
so I filled the spaces in with Elmers Glue.
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I was also missing one of the
shafts for the props. So I used my tap & die for my HO scale Kadee
Couplers on the prop & ran a plastic bolt through the engine into the
threaded prop.
I masked the cockpit windows using Elmers Glue.
The entire model was hand painted, using Model Masters Dark Green, Dark Ghost
Gray & Accupaint Stencil Black.
The brush strokes are there, the camera just doesn't pick em up.
The blue insignia decals that were included were a baby blue. Even for this
build, there was no way I could make myself apply them. So I used a set of
decals from a 1/48 Wildcat for the wings and a set of decals from
a 1/72 Academy Hellcat for the fuselage.
I spent hours of Internet searches with no such luck on finding some info on
any specific B-17 of the Battle of Midway. So I went with the "JoJo
Jinks" of the 19th Bomber Group that was included in the kit. With my
luck I'll probably find out that this B-17 was flown in the European
Campaign. If so, oh well such is life!
I hope someone finds this of some kind of interest.
Derrick
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