Your first model?

That is absolutely awesome Bill! Great little piece of background info too 

fotofrank

This is the very first model I ever built. My dad bought it for me. I think I was 10 years old. We had probably just watched Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo on Channel 4 in St. Louis. Back then, the kit was made by Revell. Now that Atlantis has re-released the kit, I plan to have this kit on the shelf very soon.

 

And it's finished. A new build of my very first model airplane! Let me just say that this build was a bit of a struggle for me, since the kit was re-popped from the original molds from the 1950's. Fit was OK, I guess typical for the time. A lot of sanding and shaping to make sure the wings fit against the fuselage tightly. Filling the fuselage seam was quite a bit of work. Fitting the canopy and nose glass and turrets took some work to make sure they all fit correctly. The framing for is on the inside so the framing didn't get painted. I chose a desert scheme because I was thinking about Catch 22 while building. The topside is a mix of Tamiya Flat Flesh and Flat White. The underside is a mix of Tamiya Flat Blue and Flat White. The deicer boots are Tamiya Rubber Black. The marking are decals I pulled out of the spares box because they fit. No weathering to speak of. Some of the paint is kinda rough appearing in spots. Along the top of the fuselage the gray primer shows through.

All in all, this was a fun trip down memory lane.

Wow that is pleasing. The stand, brings back memories.

Your nose art reminds me of a cute story.

My late F-in-Law was a crew chief in the USAAF who "owned" a P-61 Black Widow towards the end of his war. The nose art was of his girlfriend in a bathing suit (demure) holding a pennant of his High School. Thing was, she, like my wife, had (has) very dark brown hair.

When the Dopey painted her on the black airplane, she became a blonde!

Bill

I was about ten years old, so around 1964, in Brentwood, MO, and built my first ever model kit one summer afternoon, bought at the local Ben Franklin store.  It was an F-101A Voodoo, much smaller than a 1/72, either Monogram or Revell if I recall.  I made an absolute mess of it, glue all over the model and all over my hands.  I didn't use any paint but did apply all the decals, and I was hooked.  Built a few more warplanes, an airliner or two (including an Aurora Boeing 707 that was huge, took a whole bottle of TesTors silver metallic enamel to paint it in American Airlines livery), and a few cars, mostly the Ed "Big Daddy" Roth series of cartoonish funny cars.  My biggest focus, however, was the Aurora "Famous Monsters" series, every one of which I built, and had the models on display in my bedroom for years.

When HS sports and then going off to college got in the way, I stopped modeling altogether.  Nevertheless, my younger brother seriously hacked me off when he used my monster models for pellet gun practice in our basement while I was away from home.  That still gets me going when I think about it, but whaddaya gonna do?  

So move on up to 2014, after I worked in a corporate legal office for 31 years and then retired to the D/FW area (where we've been since 2008, following long stints in San Antonio and St. Louis), I took up modeling again. I had decorated my office for a few years with prebuilt diecast aircraft models, about a half dozen of them in 1/72 scale.  After retirement I filled out that collection, but about three years ago finally decided to build my own again.  I started small with a "Snap-Tite" 1/72 A-10 Warthog that I picked up at the nearby Michael's hobby and craft store.  I bought some TesTors paint and did some reminiscing as I built the very simple kit, and was hooked again. For old times' sake, my second build was the 1992 Revell-Monogram F-101B in 1/72.  The original decals disintegrated when I put them in water, so I also learned early on the joys of after-market decal shopping!  Another bonus was that while looking for the decals, I discovered FSM, to my great joy.

I'm now in the process of replacing all the diecast aircraft models in my collection with my own builds, and have also bought some armor and ship kits to look forward to building, along with the new Chase Elliot #9 2022 car model from Salvinos JR.  That last one, which I've unboxed but not yet started, is without doubt the most minutely detailed vehicle model I have ever seen. Can't wait to get going on it!