Mark Vaughn

As you can see, the fuselage, which is made from some solid black cast material, disintegrated, as if it had taken a direct hit!   This was not due to physical mistreatment but internal stresses finally tearing it apart.  Usually I can salvage/repair models for the Cavalcade of Wings, but I decided to just start over.  I don’t know how old this original was but it has raised lettering on the under surface of a wing, so it was an old kit.  Fortunately Italeri made one in 1/72, a 1975 mold, and I snagged one on eBay.  It has a rudimentary interior (seats along the wall) and a basic cockpit.  Since this is for a museum, and most patrons would likely not understand why the glider’s nose was “broken,” I built it with the swing-up cockpit down so there was little reason to doll-up the interior.  You could drive a Jeep into one of these!  I would have done more with the cockpit had I realized how visible it is with the greenhouse windshield – painted with Future! 

The actual build was simple right out of the box.  While the Wacos we see in the D-Day movies have the invasion recognition stripes, the trainers did not have them (preserving my stash of black and white trim film).  I resisted filling the wing-fuselage join since these had a big gap.  They were kit planes with removable wings.

The Italeri decals disintegrated on contact with water, so I had to use some stars from my stash.  Since the stars on the demolished models were the early ones without the “paddles,” I removed the paddles with a little surgery.  They are not quite right, since the tips of the stars should go all the way to the edge, but since the viewers will be feet away, and unaware of this detail, good enough.  Apparently, some trainers didn’t have numbers or they were painted out, so I didn’t worry over the disintegrated tail numbers.  Here’s a photo of a training wreck with numbers painted over.  You can barely see the old numbers under the paint.