Hi, having joined here recently, I'm progressively posting the models I have built since I started this great hobby early last year. I thought I'd group them into various categories, and this time it's good old prop-driven airliners of the early days, including a couple of flying boats. All of these were among the first few models I built, so they're a bit rough in places, but I still enjoy looking at them very much.
Gotta start with a DC-3. Minicraft kit in 1/144 wearing Pan Am livery.
Williams kit in 1:72 of the Boeing 247. It comes with the option of the forward sloping windscreen or the rearwards sloper, and it was the rearward sloper that made me want to build it in the first place.
Avro Lancastrian (Amodel kit in 1/144) wearing Qantas livery. This was my first "horrible" kit where things just didn't go together well. Learnt a lot during this build, mostly what not to do!
Boeing 314 Dixie Clipper, 1/144 kit by Airfix. This was my first 'nice' kit where everything went well together. Love flying boats, I'm sure to build some more.
Told you I love flying boats. Consolidated Catalina PBY5A, 1/144 kit by Minicraft. A lot of work needed to get the fuselage halves to match up but it's great to have one of my favourite old workhorses to admire whenever I like (and there's a real 1:1 scale Catalina in an aircraft museum only 1.5 hours south of where I live that's in good flying condition - a thrill to see it).
And finally, the very first model anything I ever built, the Revell 1/77 kit of the Ford Trimotor. I made ultra-basic mistakes like not knowing that parts wouldn't fit together nicely (such as the windscreen). It's so much fun being a beginner. The thrill of finishing your first kit is truly excellent, and then later on you actually look at your first effort and depending on your mood you either wince a bit – or chuckle a bit. Either way I'm fond of it.
Recently, I was clearing out my empty boxes of built models (due to a lack of space) and I came across some little figures of dogs, sleds and dogsledders which came with the Ford Trimotor kit, so for fun I put it together and taught myself how to make a little snow diorama.
That got me thinking that I really should one day rebuild the Trimotor, but this time with the skis instead of wheels, and set the whole thing up on a snowy diorama, complete with the dogs and sleds, etc. And by good fortune I found at a good price an old Monogram kit still in its plastic wrapper which comes with the "Antarctic Expedition" decals I need to complete the scene. I've read some negative comments about the Monogram kit (and the Revell one, for that matter) but I'm heading for Antarctica and no one can stop me!
