Trawling the stash

My trawl through the stash in the garage was made distinctly more difficult this weekend by the fact that I have just closed down our storage unit and brought all those boxes into the garage and basement. You never realize just how much crap you have accumulated in one of those units until you try to move it all in the space of a few days. One casualty of the move has been my lower back, which means I have been walking around at about a 45 degree angle most of the time. Without any access to the good stuff (I’m drug-resistant enough that OTC meds don’t really do much), let’s just say I’ve been spending a lot of time horizontal catching up on my reading.

But that doesn’t mean I didn’t hobble out and find some new models to place at the beginning of the production cycle. Oh, I’m still slowly pushing the Italeri SM-82 and the Williams Bros C-46, to keep them from ending up on the Shelf of Shame. But I did want to get some brand new things started.

One was the result of a bungled assembly job. Now, I’ll admit that it is not easy to mess up a modern Revell kit. But I found a way. Typically, it was due to impatience and a seeming inability to read instructions (none of us has that problem, certainly). It was the Revell Gotha Go-229, the production version of the Horten Ho-9 flying wing. Let’s just say that I decided to ignore most of the interior of the main wheel well – until I found out that with the way the kit is engineered, a lot of the inside is visible from the outside. Plus I managed to glue some gear doors shut which fouled the nose wheel’s gear struts. And you can see the nose weight hanging right above those doors I thought should have been closed. Definitely a royal clusterschmazz. What to do?

Well, as luck would have it (why can’t I catch this sort of break in my income hunt?) I actually have two copies of this Revell kit. Since I have relatively few duplicates in the stash this was not a foregone conclusion. I believe I bought a second one when I had forgotten that I already had a copy of the kit. See, brain farts can in some instances produce good results!

So here’s the plan: take a little more care on the second Go-229 and put it in Luftwaffe markings. Go ahead and complete the first one, but put it in USAAC markings and make it a What-if model. Now there is a (thankfully) small segment of the modelling public that absolutely cannot tolerate whif models, though even that part seems to have shrunk in the last 10 years. Wait til those guys see my 1:72 B-36 in Bomber Command colors. But I kind of enjoy the tangent. I have done a lot of Luftwaffe 46 types in my day, but not many Allied whiffs. Well, there was the Northrop Vector, the fourth V-bomber, a Brit version of the B-49.

Next: some more new additions to the production line.