Early in the summer of 2019 I started building a 1/48 scale Minicraft Beech T-34B Mentor like the one I crashed in on June 2, 1966, when I was 19. After the crash, which occurred high in the Black Range mountains of southwestern New Mexico, and after I spent a week in hospital, my girlfriend took this picture of me sitting on the wing of the Mentor’s sister ship:
I’ve now finished my model, and while it’s very far from what I hoped I would accomplish, I’m pleased with it:
Among the accidents and screw-ups during the build:
• I dropped the canopy on our tile floor, then stepped on it, scratching it.
• I lost a wing-light lens when it was “launched” from a pair of tweezers. I asked Minicraft for a replacement (which they nicely accommodated).
• I broke the right main landing gear three times, the joystick twice, the nose wheel once, the right horizontal stabilizer once, and both of the minuscule canopy handles. I repaired the the broken parts, but gave up on the canopy handles and made my own out of pieces of sprue. At some point during these debacles, I built a jig out of cardboard to keep the model off the table and secure.
• I warmed a rattle can of glossy yellow Tamiya paint too much before spraying and ended up with a wing that looked like orange peel. I learned that full recovery from a goof like that is nearly impossible. At the same time, it proved to be really easy to remove panel lines and rivet heads! In the end I think I sprayed about six coats of yellow paint on the model, and didn’t wait long enough between coats with the result that some drips occurred and couldn’t be removed satisfactorily.
• I didn’t wait long enough for the last coat of yellow paint to dry before using black acrylic paint for the wing walks. Black and yellow paint mixed together don’t just look bad! They look awful! And I must be more patient with my next model!
• Once I completed the basic airframe (minus the formats part of the cowling) and added the wheels, I realized that I hadn’t put enoughI failed to add enough Liquid Gravity in the cavity behind the propeller to keep the plane from sitting on its tail. Only by adding more Liquid Gravity to the nose-wheel well was I able to get the Mentor to sit properly on its wheels, but that meant that the interior of the wheel well looked like Liquid Gravity held in place with white glue. Toward the end I just covered the Liquid Gravity with a thin strip of styrene and painted it gunmetal gray.
I never knew there were so many ways to mess up a model! However, I charged ahead and added some details that weren’t called for in the kit:
• Using brass wire, I added a radio mast on top of the cockpit, two aerials just ahead of the windscreen, and a “device” (I have no idea what it is) to the windscreen itself, and yet another aerial on top of the tail fin.* Most of these additions, I’m afraid, aren’t to scale.
• Using sheet styrene, I built a direction finder to mount behind the cockpit. I used sewing thread to create static wicks on the wingtips and rudder, and made my own decals to represent the actual Forest Service plane I crashed in, registered as N145Z.** The tiny tail lights proved to be impossible to handle, so I “built” them using Liquid Window; I also used Liquid Window to create the nose light because the part that came with the kit is impossible large and out of scale.
I am now considering my T-34 model to have been a “test bed” on which I could practice procedures and use materials which I had encountered; models and modelling supplies in the 1950s were primitive by today’s standards. At the same time, I’m not at all sure that building models today is a more enjoyable pastime than it was in the 1950s.
About the same time I started the T-34, I also began working on a 1/72 scale Airfix HP.52 Hampden bomber. That’s almost finished (finally!) — I’ll report on that at a later date. And in the meantime, I’m also beginning two other models, an Academy F-86F Sabre in 1/72 scale, and an Italeri Sikorsky UH-34D Seahorse helicopter, also in 1/72 scale; the Seahorse is like the ones that took me into combat in Vietnam on March 4, 1966, and evacuated me the next day after I’d been seriously wounded in Operation Utah.
In my stash, there is another Minicraft T-34B. I have fond hopes that my next attempt will produce a far more "professional" looking model. I might even risk some weathering!
Bob Ingraham
Vancouver
* I have no idea why the T-34, which was an ex-Navy trainer, needed all of those antennas!
** Registration N145Z is now assigned to another Forest Service plane, a Short SD3-60 (twin-turboprop).