Valom Mk7 nuke and Mk7 nuke transport cart

A double completion today, of one very simple bomb and a somewhat less than simple transport cart to move it around.

Longterm readers will know that I have a soft spot for bomb ordnance, especially nuclear weapons. I have visions of a display of dozens of weapons that are related to aircraft. Dumb bombs, smart bombs, nuclear bombs. What I don’t like to do is overload aircraft models with a huge loadout – my interest there is in the airframe itself, unhindered by awkward things hanging off the wings. Hence, the standalone bomb (and eventually missile) display. AModel is good for providing the larger items along with transport carts. But today’s completion is actually a Valom kit.

This is the Mark 7 Thor nuclear weapon. It appears to have started out as an add-on to their B-45. But they must have realized that there was a market for the nuke as a standalone kit. I thought that was a great idea, since I had already bought a B-45 and didn’t particularly want to buy another one just to pick up these two small sprues.

As you can imagine, the nuke only has a small number of pieces, but it still provided some head-scratching as I was building it. Neither the instructions nor the photos I was able to locate on Google were definitive as to how the middle aft fin attached to the body of the bomb. In the end I just took my best guess, but be aware that I could be wrong. A Red-brown nose (I used an Xtracolour armor paint) and a silver body (from Alclad) and it was time to add decals. There were many for such a small item, but weren’t much of an issue to add.

The transport cart was a little more complex. It has a surprising number of pieces, and none of them wanted to glue in place without trauma. Mating surfaces are necessarily small, and whenever you put pressure on one piece to get it to fit, it inevitably caused another piece to break free. Lacking 7 or 8 hands for the job, I was reduced to gluing one bit and allowing it to fully cure before moving on to the next. So in real time, this cart took far more time than  had expected.

However, they are both complete – while the B-45 still sits forlornly in the short finals queue in the upstairs hobby room. And it appears that a couple of Meteors will move into the construction queue next, so it will be there for a while longer.

This is completed ordnance #9 and completed vehicle #14 (15 aircraft, 3 ordnance, 14 vehicles for the year 2017), finished in November of 2017 (bomb) and December of 2017 (cart).