Howdy!
I spent a lot of the beginning of the year wearing myself out on a 5-kit build, and decided I needed to recharge my batteries. In the last week I noticed I was perusing pictures of various aircraft, of which I had all in my stash, even though I knew that my next build is going to be a Hustler.
This is one of my all-time favorite aircraft. It just looks fast sitting perfectly still.
The kit I have chosen is an old one - Monogram's box-scale B-58 first kitted in roughly 1957, although the particular kit I have dates to the year of my birth, 1967, and is from their "blue box" line. Of note, this will be the second time in my life that I have built this kit, having done so once before many, many years ago when I was probably about 5 years old. I have since build the Italeri 1/72 Hustler, covering that one with household foil, and Monogram's 1/48 Hustler.
A few years ago I found myself waxing nostalgic over those blue box kits, and so a few trips to eBay and voila! I have an entire stash of these kits. Some came still wrapped in their original celophane wrapping, others came in far worse condition. Unfortunately, this Hustler is of the latter variety. The box is in bad shape. The kit has been started. And the kit is missing the fuel truck that came with it. I can live with out that as it was really more like a box with crude wheels.
So here is the box in all its shelf-worn glory.
The instructions are classic Monogram style, with photographs of someone assembling the parts and the exploded diagram of all the parts.
Finally, the decal sheet. It is in terrible condition. Many of the individual decals are split in multiple places, although I don't think it is as yellowed as I might otherwise have expected it to be. I will not be using this thing, as I imagine that I could spray it with decal solution or whatever that stuff is and the decals would still disintegrate if I even approached them with a cup of water. I found some decals that, while not to scale, are close enough for government work and will suffice.
The parts are in good shape. Some are still attached to the trees. The fuselage has two spots harkening back to the real early days of plastic models - ridge lines indicating where to apply decals. That used to be a standard feature - there would be an unmistakable area where you were to apply the national insignia, for instance. Thankfully most of that is not present here, but there are two triangular areas, on the nose and on the rudder, where the Hustler typically had some painted area. I cannot use the kit decals for this, and could not locate any to scale that I could purchase. So I will likely just scrape those ridges off and clean it up as best I can.
I will be painting this to match a Stan Stokes print I have of this bird in my display room. In fact, that area of my room has three such Stokes prints (Mosquito and F-117 in addition to the Hustler), and I already have Tamiya's F-117 and Airfix's 1/24 Mosquito hanging alongside those prints, so that was the motivation for pulling this ancient kit out of the stash, to fill in that open area in my display room.
I don't have any idea how long I will take to complete this. It should not be a challenging build in any form or fashion. Parts count is extremely small, and the paint scheme is NM with some variation on metallic shades and a black anti-glare panel.