At some point while working on these two, I decided I wanted to do a land-based Kingfisher, so I went back to eBay for a second baby blue box release. I spent a couple of weeks working exclusively on that one to get it to the same point that these first two were at the time. The plan was for orange-yellow wing tops, silver wing undersides and overall fuselage, with red wing chevrons, red cowling ring, and a red fuselage band, and blue empennage. I had it just about completely painted. I was placing masking to paint the wing chevrons when I lost hold of it. I have a Craftsman shop stool that I sit on while I work, and at that moment my legs were splayed out with my feet resting on a wooden footstool I keep on the lower surface of my workbench. Typically when I am working with a small piece and drop it, my instinct is to try to "catch" it with my legs. My instinct kicked in and I snapped my legs closed. Right on the Kingfisher. I heard a horrible crunching sound and knew that this was not going to be good.
And it was not. I snapped the wing off and crushed the fuselage, resulting in snapped plastic in multiple places. I could have attempted to repair this thing, but it was never going to look good. I opted to deep six it, much to my irritation.
I weathered the two surviving builds with Flory dark dirt wash and Tamiya weathering pastels. The Revell decals worked flawlessly, although I couldn't figure out why one portion of the white rectangle on the fuselage national insignia did not include the red outline. I also shaved off the awful looking grab handles and replaced with custom made handles that look far more believable.
This might be it for me for a while. It was been way too hot here in SE Texas to work in my garage workshop (I actually bought a little evaporative air cooler that works okay but even that is not really enough).