Academy Boeing B-50

The garage is pretty much the 72 Land realm, which means that I have a luxurious amount of potential storage space. The kit stash is there as well, as are racks of magazine storage, but until the massive production of the last 2 years, model display has never been a problem. One side effect of this is that I am able to indulge my passion for large aircraft, both transports and bombers.

Just in the last year I’ve completed a B-1, Valiant, Me-323, B-47, B-24, Canberra, and today’s finished model, a Boeing B-50. This is a development of the B-29, and actually was designed under the designation of B-29D until they decided enough had changed to justify a new number. What changed was basically engine and vertical tail surfaces.

When Academy did their series of B-29s, they engineered the kit so that not only the WW2 bomber could be completed, but the B-50, KB-29, and Stratocruiser as well. I think that only the wing design caused fit and seam problems. The tail and fuselage changes were pretty easy to deal with. Most B-29s are in a NMF, so any seam work assumes an extra degree of difficulty.

I actually had not intended to build a B-50. My intention was to start on an RAF Boeing Washington B1, since I had just finished the Valiant and was interested in extending my list of postwar RAF bombers. But when I started digging in the stash, I found that the B-50 had already had its cockpit construction finished, so that seemed the easiest to continue. But I never actually started on the Washington. Such is the wandering nature of 72 Land production.

Being NMF, Alclad was required, and I still haven’t found a source of new Alclad that doesn’t have the coverage/formula issues that the more recent production run seems to be exhibiting. (An aside: I wonder if the formula changed because of all the recent regulation on what constitutes “dangerous consumer chemicals”. Maybe they were forced to chemically alter their winning recipe? I guess I should really pose the question to Alclad themselves, huh?) So since I had decided on a Weather aircraft with large patches of International Orange, I masked those bits and soldiered on with the Alclad I have. The results, were, predictably, firmly in the “meh” category. Still, I did not want this adding to my Shelf of Shame, so I forced myself to finish the model. Not the best of even the last few months, but it's not going to be in the front of the cabinet anyway.

The decals came from an older Xtradecal (old enough that it is currently out of print). Excuse the cruddy background, as I still don’t have a posterboard large enough to accommodate the four engined aircraft.

This is completed model #404 (#29 for the year), completed in June of 2012.