With
summer vacation season in the offing, here's a little tribute to Midwestern
vacations past.
This
is Airfix's classic 1/76 DUKW done up as one of the fleet of Ducks
that take tourists on sightseeing sorties through the beautiful
Wisconsin Dells every summer. The company depicted has the largest active fleet of
Ducks operating in the U.S. with around 90 vehicles on hand at any
given time. All their Ducks are named after famous battles and amphibious landings.
It
was a pretty simple conversion. I sanded off the molded-on tools and
a few other unnecessary bits on the exterior, and gave the cockpit an
instrument panel, radio and fire extinguisher. Simple bench seats
were added to the cargo compartment, topped off with a raised sun
canopy with life preserver stowage underneath. The aft safety rail
with cleats for the anchor line finished it off. Paints were Tamiya acrylics mixed by eyeball, and all the decals were home-made. Not super-detailed
by any means, but lots of fun to build and very nostalgic to
research.
I
first rode one of these babies during a family vacation in 1965, and it
seemed like about the greatest adventure I'd experienced up to that point. At the time my father mentioned, very
matter-of-factly, that he had ridden in Ducks before. As a
nine-year-old that didn't seem like a big deal---at that age, you
just take it as a matter of course that your parents have pretty much
done everything. It wasn't until some years later that I
learned that his “ride” had been taken during what he would
occasionally refer to as his “olive drab road trip,” crossing the
Rhine river under heavy fire in the Spring of 1945. Now there's an adventure! (I've got the
Italeri DUKW waiting in the stash to do one of that version,
someday.)
Hope
you enjoy it.
