Randy Guenin, Wheeling, Illinois
Randy found a used Airfix 1/72 scale PBY kit at a hobby shop for $1. “That's right, only a buck,” he says. “What was the catch? Someone else had started it and didn't finish. I inspected the kit and saw it was going to be flat black. Fine, I thought, I had just finished reading a book about ‘Black Cat’ PBYs in the Pacific, so this would be perfect.” He replaced some windows with plastic from a 2-liter bottle, and used a torpedo and a 500-pound bomb from an Airfix Devastator Kit. “Putting the wingtip floats in the up position left spare parts that became a radar set,” Randy says. “Since these aircraft operated at the very end of a long supply line, I aged the paint job by rubbing powered graphite over the plane. I added some bare metal and blue patches, then sealed with Testors Dullcote. Looking at it now, I got a pretty good model out of the deal.” Randy used Photoshop to pose his Catalina in flight.