An expedition is planned to locate the wreckage of Richard Bong’s famous P-38J Lightning “Marge,” which crashed into the jungle on the north coast of New Guinea following engine trouble, in March 1944. The pilot flying it that day, Thomas Malone, safely bailed out. This same aircraft, 42-103993, is depicted on the box art of Tamiya’s recent 1/48 P-38J Lightning kit.
This kit goes way back- way, way back- to 1967, 57 years ago. It was during scale modeling’s “Golden Age” when model kits were sold everywhere, catering to kids but already well on the way to the accurate model replicas we enjoy today. Although these models were simpler to build, they weren’t all bad, and this kit was one of them.
The kit came in a sturdy cardboard box with that classic Revell box art that unfortunately disappeared by the early 1970s and was never duplicated. Three model kits were included- an I-16, a CR.42 and a PZL P.11c- with Nationalist Chinese, Swedish and Polish decal markings respectively. Although the kits were simple, the upside was each could be completed after only a day or so on the workbench, which would be difficult with today’s kits.
I found the CR.42 and the PZL P.11c could be built straight from the box; I added a pilot figure to each cockpit with no additional work necessary. In fact, the only other extras I added were rigging wires to the external support struts on the CR.42 and landing gear support wires to the P.11c. These two kits went together quickly and looked nice when completed, equal to any contemporary kit of these famous aircraft.
The I-16 was a tougher nut to crack. Originally kitted by Revell in 1964 – 60 years ago – it suffered from a near total lack of information on Russian aircraft at the time, due to the Cold War. So some of the shapes don’t add up, specifically the wings, which taper to the tips unlike the rounded wings found on the real plane. It also has large empty holes where the landing gear pans should be. So I applied an old fix to an even older kit and used long-defunct Guano Aeroplane and Zeppelin Works aftermarket wing parts and borrowed landing gear pans from an ICM I-16 kit. Both worked well with a little filling and sanding, and the kit finished quickly.
When it came time for decaling, I used Revell’s Swedish markings for the CR.42. After a short time soaking in warm water the decals were as easy to apply as the day they were printed, remarkable for a decal sheet from a 1960s dime store kit. For the P.11c, I cheated and used Polish markings from a recent TechMod decal sheet, and for the I-16 I used Revell’s Chinese roundels and tail stripes but fuselage numbers from an LF Models sheet.
Well this quick build of an old kit turned out nicely. With a minimum of fuss and a few modern parts and decals, you can get a decent result for a fraction of the cost of a contemporary kit. These old Revell kits are great for anyone looking to improve their modeling skills and have a little fun while they’re doing it.
The kit theme- 3 Freedom Fighters of WWII- also got me thinking; what would a similar model kit theme look like today? “Three Freedom Fighters of 2024” might not be crewed aircraft at all, but drones!
Hey, as a modeler I’m like anyone else and enjoy building the latest and greatest kits from cutting edge manufacturers. But with the price of plastic super high these days it pays to take a look at the oldies-but-goodies, like the veteran Italeri 1/35 Panzer IV. These kits are 50 years old now and have been reissued many times, including by Testors as a yellow-label kit, but darn if they don’t build up as a decent mid-range Panzer IV. Here’s an image of the original kit boxtop, from way back in 1974.
These kits offer great value-for-money and on that basis are hard to beat, especially for Afrika Korps enthusiasts who want a buildable, affordable Panzer IV F.1 or F.2. I recently finished one as a DAK F.1 circa 1942, straight OOB with the original stiff vinyl tracks, and it sure looks like what it’s supposed to be. Italeri even re-released this old warhorse with upgraded molds about 10 years ago, a real sweetheart of a kit with photoetch, link-and-length tracks and other improvements, which if you find one second-hand on eBay, is a great deal and will build into a nice replica.
Now I realize Panzer experten have a long list of inaccuracies they quibble about with this kit, and much prefer more recent superkits with a thousand parts and price tag to match, but for sheer modeling enjoyment and a chance to improve your modeling skills, the Italeri kit is hard to beat. If you have one of these kits in your stash, it’s well worth building- the Sahara beckons!
There are so many kits being released by so many manufacturers these days that it’s easy to overlook some interesting subjects and this is one of them- the ICM 1/35 Liberty B Truck. This late-WWI beast was one of the first modern, standardized trucks for the U.S. Army but it really entered the history books as the backbone of the 1919 Army Transcontinental Motor Convoy, an attempt to cross the good old U.S. of A. from coast to coast by road. Sounds fun, right? It was, until the roads ran out and your truck flopped.
In fact, most of the way, from the Midwest to the Sierra Nevada, was completely unpaved. This made a big impression on one of the officers along for the ride- Dwight D. Eisenhower- who later as President during the 1950s pushed through and enacted our modern interstate highway system. So next time you cruise I-40 & I-25, thank Ike- and the Liberty B.
It took me about a month, off and on, of modeling ingenuity to get this kit together, but despite a little problem-solving required at each step of the build, I enjoyed my time on the workbench and was rewarded with a detailed replica of an American truck I previously knew nothing about. The model comes with a representation of the canvas cover for the truck bed or can be built with just the ribs but I kept both for realism. I modified the tilt over the driver’s compartment, based on a photo of one of these trucks, which also served to set the model apart from a standard build. The modification was easy and allowed a view into the cab. The leather straps securing the tilt I added from an old True Details 1/48 PE seatbelt set- it was a perfect fit.
The finished model makes a decent stand-alone replica or can be used as the centerpiece of a diorama, as ICM makes some nice WWI U.S. Army figures, including a driver’s set.
This is a kit I’d recommend and especially one that makes for a good introduction to an array of 1/35 truck kits by Ukrainian company ICM- they are truly King of the Road now in 1/35 military softskins. In fact, I’ll be building several more ICM kits after this one- look for more reviews to follow.
Here’s a new 1/200 model of the Artemis moon rocket, in its uncrewed November 2022 test flight configuration. This is the craft NASA hopes will return astronauts to the Moon, although the agency just announced they are postponing a Moon trip with humans aboard until 2025 or 2026.
What caught my eye was the AMT box art, which is a good match for the box art of AMT’s classic 1/200 “Man in Space” rocket kit set circa 1970. This kit I remember well from my Space Age childhood, with a kit included of every U.S. manned rocket that had marched us to the Moon in less than a decade.
For me the Space Age was real life; in the late 1960s I went to elementary school down the street from North American’s plant in Downey, CA, which built the Apollo command module. At recess, I stood at the schoolyard fence and watched trailers with rocket parts rolling up the street to the plant, which was a real anthill, employing thousands of people.
Best of all, everybody in those days built model kits- they were everywhere, available in convenience stores and department stores and every store in between. Even Walter Cronkite had the bug, showing off NASA display models during every Apollo moon launch telecast.
Fortunately the Round2 company, which owns the AMT label and several other famous modeling brand names, has been releasing both new and classic model kits under the old logos- their website is worth checking out to see the variety of kits they produce, including kits under the popular Polar Lights brand.
The AMT Artemis kit looks like a nice model well worth building and will give modelers an idea of what the next crewed trip up to the Moon will look like in terms of hardware. This model is so interesting I might kitbash one myself- stay tuned!
Those who have been with the club awhile know the routine, but by tradition the first three club meetings of the year have a standard schedule, as per below, but note the special additions:
Also at the January 5th meeting, I’ll be bringing some boxes full o’ kits for a “$5 and under sale” with proceeds going to ASM. No one is flush with cash in early January, right after the holidays, so all kits will be in the $1 to $5 range. Most of these kits are fun and buildable so pick some up as workbench fodder, to hone your modeling skills.
Contest Director Ken Liotta has been working hard on our 2024 contest schedule that will be unveiled at the Friday meeting. There are some neat contests and guest speakers lined up for the coming year so plenty of reasons to cut sprue and get some models to the contest tables.
I’d also like to express thanks to ASM member Joe Lavender for his excellent “scratch” presentation at our December meeting, covering his amazing work crafting miniature ship models. Like other club members, I’m in awe of his skill in building these micro-vessels, which borders on the miraculous. Joe’s talk qualified as one of the most interesting clinic presentations I’ve seen, part how-to, part ship modeling overview, and part history talk. And best of all, Joe is set to give a talk in May on the WWII Battle of the North Cape in December 1943, the last major naval battle in the European theater that involved only surface vessels.
Happy New Year to everyone and looking forward to Friday’s meeting and contest.
John Tate
ASM President
Although part of the EAA “Land of Enchantment Fly-In,” this plane deserves it’s own article. This jet, a Fouga Magister, has a lot of wear and grime you don’t usually see on an airshow plane. It’s a 1960s French jet trainer that saw action in brushfire conflicts in places like Africa, Central America and the Middle East during the Cold War. Good fodder for scale model weathering!
Saturday, 9/23/23, was Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) Chapter 179’s “Land of Enchantment Fly-in” at the Double Eagle II Airport in Albuquerque. Here are images I took of warbirds and other aircraft present, as well as the Cavalcade of Wings table in the display hangar, staffed by ASM’s Michael Howell.
John Tate
With the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, it’s worth a look back to see what the hobby offered around that time for modelers interested in replicating the conflict for their display shelves. In terms of military equipment, the Yom Kippur War was a showdown between U.S. and Soviet war machines and a number of these were available in kit form. But scale modeling in the 1970s was very much a case of the box art looking better than the kit, so no matter the subject, a modeler had his work cut out for him when he started cutting sprue.
In that era, the hobby was taking its first steps from toy towards replica and despite a growing number of adult enthusiasts, manufacturers still focused on younger modelers. So often a model was engineered with simplicity in mind with details and accuracy taking a back seat to ease of construction. Most kits from that era were just basic shapes, consisting of airframe parts, landing gear, a few missiles or bombs and a rudimentary cockpit seat and pilot; it was up to the modeler to turn that into a representation of the real thing. Quite a bit of work was involved, with sanding, puttying, shimming, carving and accurizing taking up most of a modeler’s time. Aftermarket resin parts and photoetch were nonexistent with the only extras a modeler could expect to find being Microscale decal sheets. Most of all, in those pre-internet days, a modeler was dependent on his local hobby shop or a few mail-order outlets, like Squadron or Polk’s Hobby Department Store in New York City, for an up-to-date selection of kits.
Aircraft
In the early-to-mid 1970s, when a modeler thought of 1/32 scale, he thought of Revell, which had pioneered a line of 1/32 aircraft kits starting in the 1960s. The Revell 1/32 kits available then that could depict a plane from the Mideast conflict were the F-4E Phantom II and the MiG-21PF, with the Mirage 5J showing up a few years later. The surprise here is, if you want a 1/32 MiG-21PF today, the old Revell kit is still the only game in town. Fortunately, there were even some Microscale decal sheets available for these kits, which included Israeli and Egyptian markings.
1/48 scale? Still something of an oddball scale back then, with most quarter-scale kits being from the original “bluebox” Monogram series of WWII planes. But Fujimi had three decent 1/48 (or were they 1/50?) kits that fit the Mideast War theme- the Mirage IIIC, A-4 Skyhawk and F-4E Phantom II.
1/72 scale was king, and the greatest variety of Mideast War airplane kits in that scale were from Airfix, Frog, Hasegawa and Matchbox. About the best that could be said about these kits was that they were affordable and available at almost any hobby shop.
Armor
If you were an armor modeler in the early-to-mid 1970s and wanted to build a 1/35 Yom Kippur War subject, you could have any brand you wanted as long as it was Tamiya. These models sort of looked like the real thing, although motorization had taken priority over accuracy and you had to live with rubber-band tracks and odd dimensions. In that era, about the only references available, especially for Soviet subjects, were blurry photos in news magazines. And come to think of it, those were probably the references Tamiya used as well.
Best of Show
The most popular Mideast War model kit back then, and one that was contemporaneous with the 1973 war, was the Airfix 1/72 SAM-2 missile, truck and launcher. The real thing was used in great numbers by Arab forces during the Yom Kippur War and took a toll of Israeli aircraft, so it was frequently mentioned in news reports. Of all the models from that era, this is the one that most fits the conflict and the one I would most want to build today, but unfortunately it is one of the few Airfix molds that was lost or damaged beyond repair and the kit has not been reissued since the mid-1970s. They still can be found on eBay, but expect to pay collector’s prices for a dime-store kit molded 50 years ago.
Even if you don’t care to go down the Golden Age nostalgia route, give some thought to building a kit depicting a subject from the October 1973 war, a conflict that can focus the attention of modelers today as much as it did a half-century ago. Thankfully for all of us, it was the last conventional state vs. state conflict between Israel and the Arab nations, and unlike 1973, no one has to worry about oil embargoes driving up the price of plastic.
From The Modelling News website. Full article can be found here.
Hosted annually by the Illawarra Plastic Modellers’ Association, this year’s 2023 New South Wales Scale Model Show was held last weekend in lovely Illawarra shire. The show was held at the Illawarra Sports Stadium in Berkeley, Australia.
Over 300 entrants in to the modellers competition, traders from all over and Model associations were there including APMA, IPMA & IPMS NSW of course!
