Having painted the Indian elephants and a bunch of odds and ends that had attempted to go AWOL from their packages I again dug around in The Vault seeking the remaining elephants that I just KNOW are hiding somewhere. After a half-hour of searching I was left unrewarded and vexed. I decided to let the matter go for the time being and seek solace in some styrene. The first kit that came to hand was a garage-sale find that had set me back the princely sum of fifty cents; an ancient Lindberg Arado AR-234 that had been manufactured in the late sixties/early seventies and had been started by it's previous owner.
The poor design of the canopy which is split vertically instead of horizontally left a seam that runs straight through the clear panels where a horizontal split would have hidden the seam in one of the frames. This is an unusual mistake from Lindberg whose kits, while simple, were usually well thought-out. I really want to use the kit glass so that I can stay within my mission of "straight out of the box" builds, but unless I can make some progress clearing up the join I will have to try heat-forming a replacement. We will see how all this pans out.
UPDATE
Well I figured that I would just go ahead and use the kit-supplied canopy so the next step was getting some paint on this bird. Checking references it seems that the chaos of the last few months of the war overcame the German tendency for order; colors, schemes, markings etc all seem to have been a pretty much as hoc mess. Combined with the ruinous state of the decals I found myself just winging it. I picked a likely scheme from one of the many that I found and dug around in the spares bin looking for decals. The decals didn't comply with the late-war "outline" crosses as the entire rest of my collection predates 1940, but by the time I had gotten to that point I was fed-up and just wanted to be done with it.
In the future I will examine my garage-sale "finds" a little more closely to ensure that I avoid (or plan for) the string of misfortunes that accompanied this build.
I built the kit back in 1965. It was fun then but that is looking through younger less discriminating eyes.
ReplyDeleteI did as well; then my brother, cousin and I promptly shot it to pieces with BB guns. It isn't a bad kit, this one has been harshly treated over the years. It just compares poorly to other Lindberg kits of the era.
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