This plane has a special significance to me. My mom's aunt's cousin was a flier on the No. 16 B-25 (Bat Outta Hell) in the Doolittle raid, and he was eventually captured and, sadly, executed by the Japanese. I built the Monogram B-25J as a kid, but never finished it, and it of course wasn't a Doolittle Raid plane.
Now that I'm back into modeling, I wanted to make his plane and ship it to my mom's aunt, who has always been interested in the raid and his story. A park is named after him in Kansas, and an exhibit used to be on display at the Aerospace Museum of California here in Sacramento, where the 16 aircraft had a stopover on their way to the raid.
The Accurate Miniatures kit is the only one in 1/48, and it fortunately has decals for all 16 Raider aircraft. It seems to have some fit issues, but overall I really like the surface detail and the interior detail and the fact that the instructions go to great lengths to discuss the differences between the Raider aircraft and the standard B-25B.
So to start, the box art:
I decided to build up the main interior pieces before starting on the interior green color and adding details. So far, I have built the cockpit structure, but I left the instrument panel and seats off until after I get some paint down.
After doing that and constructing the nose section, I built the main parts of the bomb bay and added a few of the waist details. Before painting the interior green, I wanted to do the aluminum of the bomb bay and a few of the other bits like the gear legs, bomb bay doors and wheels.
I went with Alclad II, base-coating it gloss black and then finishing it with polished aluminum.
The Doolittle Raiders had a fuel cell added to the bomb bay, and here it is held together without glue.
So that's where it sits now, for the most part. I've also built the engine nacelles, the wings and the rear stabilizer as well as the vertical stabilizer parts (which will be left off until after paint).
It looks like a fair amount of filling and fitting will be needed on those, but I'll take it one step at a time.
Comments welcome - thanks for looking!
-BD-