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Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Hasegawa Boeing B-47

Hear my tale of woe, o mighty, and despair.

Some models are just snakebit. Despite your best intentions, they exhibit a bunch of (usually stupid) errors and rookie mistakes. But at some point you realize how much time you’ve already invested in the thing and you just want it done. Since I am a self-identified “Assembler of Plastic Kits” as opposed to “Modeller” this does happen to me occasionally. And this was especially irksome, since it was a local Boeing product.

Snakebite was certainly the case with today’s finished example, the Hasegawa Boeing B-47. I can’t even tell you when I started it, but it wasn’t in the last 5 years. I spent a lot of time and effort sanding down the raised lines and rivets while trying to miss the vortex generators on the wing. It isn’t one of Hasegawa’s better engineered kits, so there was a lot of dryfitting, adjustment, and PSRing in the process. It even spent some time on the Shelf of Shame. Finally, in 2011 I decided to get it finished. I used my last bottle of functioning Alclad on it, in fact.

And then, I put a small but noticeable glue part-fingerprint right on the top of the fuselage. After telling the model what I thought of it in terms that would make a dockworker blush, I tried just buffing it out, then sanding a small circle and respraying. But I could never get the finish to look consistent, and this came when I discovered the problem with certain Alclad paints. I used nearly a half bottle of Dull Aluminum and it barely covered a patching strip 8” long. In fact, as you’ll shortly see (the problem is along the fuselage spine), it didn’t really even cover that. Refusing to admit defeat, I just got the decals on and got it ready for the display case. The dark back end of the display case. If I had a display case in Siberia, this model would be in it. In truth, this was part and parcel of the Great Mojo Implosion last November.

It’s really too bad, since the decals were one of the few cases of an attention-grabbing scheme on a B-47. This was the anniversary markings that were applied for the 1000th Wichita-built B-47 which was featured on an old SuperScale (72-561) sheet. The decals went on smoothly. If only I had found that bottle of functioning Alclad that I mentioned in yesterday’s entry before decaling, I might possibly have saved it.

Under normal circumstances I probably would never have displayed it here. But when I started this blog, I decided to feature every model I finished, good or bad, if only to show that it is ok to display your work without fear even if it is not exactly Nationals caliber. Time to put money where mouth is, I guess. And no, I haven't acquired a larger backdrop yet either. Time to build some smaller aircraft!


This is completed model #377, finished in March of 2012.

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