Gaston

Great work! Much better colors in the second set of photos! What scale and what brand? Gaston

How is the shape on that monitor? (now that some time has passed) Trumpeter's supposedly "sound" Essex class was so far off on the bow, I'm still rolling my eyes at the perspective of anything they might do... I'm staying away from them almost no matter what by now... Gaston

I agree about the lack of a Nelson and Rodney, and about how great it is to get a Monitor type(!): The problem with the Rodney/Nelson however is the same problem that plagues much of what you suggest is missing, which is in large part aircraft carriers: Nelson and Rodney, because of their strange configuration, look about as attractive as oil tankers, and that is even more true of the aircraft carriers... I am sure, without even knowing anything about it, that aircraft carriers are poor sellers compared to battleships. I would not blame manufacturers for not making even the minimal number of famous carrier types, when even Enterprise would lose them money compared to almost any Battleship: I can't blame you for being upset at this either, given their historical significance, except to reassure you that far dumber things (to my eyes) do go on in many other areas of this hobby (I'll mention here brain-dead metal hulls in 1/48th scale tanks, while I am at it...) What make these aesthetic considerations worse is that ships are more of a long term building investment, so it is kind of hard to commit to something essentially unattractive for the long term, while for an aircraft you can sidestep into ugly ones once in a while more easily I guess: Despite this, you will notice few transport aircrafts are ever offered, despite some of those being actually quite attractive... My comments on kit age and "famous vs obscure" are mainly informed by WWII 1/48th aircrafts, where kit maker behaviour seems to me rather more strange and dumb than what I can see in 1/350 ships. Even Hasegawa's Akagi makes sense to me, as its configuration is rather more exposed and interesting, from a modelling point,of view, than most other aircraft carriers... It even looks kind of better than most carriers... To me the 1/450 Yamato is an attempt to re-start another scale (a very pleasing one I think, considering how nicely executed and affordable it is) so it doesn't really qualify to me as over-producing in 1/350... To my mind there is only one 1/350 scale Yamato, Tamiya's new tool, and that doesn't strike me as too many: If anything, I would like to see another one with hull plating detail and a less insane price! There is room for another, cheaper, 1/350 Yamato! I see your point about some ships like the KGV, which does need newer tooling: My comments were more directed at the general idea that famous desirable subjects are overproduced: This is generally completely untrue for aircrafts outside of 1/32 scale, where the choice of subject in that scale is mostly famous because the scale is still essentially re-starting from ten years ago: My point was that most makers in most fields avoid overlapping old kits, even when these old kits are crap, and those crappy old kits are often of famous subjects... New kits of famous subjects are often crap as well, and for some reason I notice obscure subjects getting much luckier, for whatever reason: This makes even less sense, but happens all the time... About US Cruisers and Battleships, you probably have a point as well, but if I can see any reason for this, it is that Axis will usually outsell Allied... On top of that, battleships were more of a Japanese "specialty" in a way that it was not for the US fleet: The "specialty" of the US fleet was its carriers... In addition, compared to oddball pagodas and strange shapes, many WWII-era US ships look (to my eyes) kind of "generic" and less colourful... What I can say is this: What is being made happens to be more in line with what I am attracted to, and for once the makers, market and releases in ships are not something I find quite as nonsensical as elsewhere, except for the dumb hull errors in 1/200 scale... For instance, I would not complain if post WWII ships were absent, even though I would recognize the validity of complaints about it... Gaston

Fantastic stuff!: Did not even know about this one... Gaston

+10 on all of those! Gaston

I disagree with the general premise of the OP: What I really see instead are obscure subjects being well-kitted (because kitted more recently) while famous subjects linger on with old crap kits... The OP completely ignores that obscure subjects have a huge inherent advantage over famous ones: The famous ones will usually be kitted first, therefore they will suffer from usually being the oldest releases around. This is a universally true rule far more impacting those wanting famous kits than those wanting obscure ones... With obscure subjects you either have a recent kit or you don't have anything... Pretty easy and clear-cut... The exceptions to the old crap rule would be cases of unusually good old kits: In aircrafts, this doesn't happen too much, one of the rare exceptions being the Monogram 1/48 B-17G. That famous "overproduced" subjects are not overkitted, at least not to a good quality level, can be best examplified by WWII 1/48th aircrafts: Everyone knows that the Me-109 is overkitted right? Not true in any manner: The G-models represented 70%+ of its 30 000 production, yet the current "state of the art" 1/48 kit is the Hasegawa G, which has just recently hit its quater-century mark: A small number of attempts have been made since, all were very poor. This would not be a problem if the vintage Hasegawa Gustav kit itself was not a joke accuracy-wise, with a cross-section fictional by 10%... This will probably be fixed in a few months by Eduard and Zvezda, but it still took 26 years to produce an up-to-date kit of the most produced and supposedly in-demmand fighter kit of all times... 1/48th WWII aircraft kit releases in recent times have been more along the lines of obscure scout and recon aircrafts... The Spitfire is in exactly the same situation as the Me-109G, with only Airfix and Eduard this year producing accurate up-to -date kits Spitfires (P.R. XIX and Mk IX), despite accurate kits having been expected for decades... The same holds perfectly true for the Yamato: New research had uncovered many new things about this secretive battleship, and the previous Tamiya kit had no hull plating detail of any kind: It would be a crime if the only kits available of this most famous Battleship were the old Tamiya kits and a handful of odd-scale antiques... I would of course rather see that they get old kits right to begin with, so that there would be no need for "updating"... See the 1956(!) release date Revell 1/196 "Constitution" to see what I mean... It shows what was in fact always possible, even with 1950s technology: To produce plastic kits to a level of quality and accuracy that makes most modern kits look like junk... This not being an ideal world, most famous kits get poorly treated in usually less sophisticated times, and it is a good thing we eventually get the badly needed updating, if it is an improvement... The only problem with the new Yamato is that it is just too expensive, to a point which shows that this hobby has become nearly unsustainable: Make no mistakes about it: The Yamato is that expensive because of the expected low sales volume, which has to be made up in unit cost... Ken Lawrence, of Pacific Coast Models, said it best about our so-called "Golden Age": "Internet sales will not generate enough volume to allow investment in new moulds" Please don't mention here prestige internet-only projects like Wingnut Wings or Zoukei-Mura: They avoid brick and mortar shop competition precisely because they are not meant to compete: Think "Citizen Kane": "I'm told our paper loses a million a year. I have a hundred millions: I figure we can go on another hundred years..." There are a few things like that out there, like the "New Yorker" magazine and many flying museums... The real problem is actually that re-doing famous subjects does not happen often enough: Instead of updating horrible old kits, aircrafts makers have chosen to flee into the fantasyland of low-volume high-cost 1/32 (to better match low and lowering Internet volumes), leaving 1/48th in virtual limbo: Number of Hasegawa-Tamiya WWII releases in the past five years: 1... In 1/35th scale WWII armor it is another story: Here there is a real glut of famous kits subjects done to a high standard: And what do we see?: A pretty wide, and widening, selection of lesser-known types... They probably have it best in choice of obscure subjects, and yet don't mind all those overlapping Panthers and Shermans: On the contrary, instead of complaining about those, they routinely combine the best of each kit to improve the final result... Let's have the big subjects at least done right before we complain about them being done too much... And yes there is such a thing as a subject being done right: Just look at the 1956 Revell "Constitution" if you don't believe me... Gaston

Inaccurate Tamiya models getting a free pass... Their recent Il-2 or Fi-156 for instance... The worst though is moulded-in assymetries: Monogram's B-29 had a flaw in the right fuselage mould (right from the start in 1977) so they bored out the right fuselage to polish it out... Now the kit is "swollen" on the right side. You can see that by the wing stubs which are still the same depth to the centerline: They stick out less on the right side... The fuselage steel mould's tail is also warped under heat treatment, so the fin tilts to the left as does the top rear turret bases compared to the front ones... The entire tail is warped out of alignment, and it has nothing to do with the de-moulding of the plastic... A much more recent example shows troubles are never really far away: Hasegawa's 1/48th FW-190A-5/6/7/8/9 series have fuselage issues and the main wings warped, because the right wing sits lower than the left on all the ten I owned: Also the right wing has a different angle of attack (higher), and the wing tips show a lot more top if you don't carve them down and try to twist the wing front down... Fin is tilted to the left as well... Mind you, this is the exact same across ten kits of various variants, boxings and vintages... Great kit (gear angle setting is great), great canopy, but lousy symmetry... All the 1/48th P-38s have symmetry troubles as well (less so Monogram's 50 year old kit!) Gaston

To my mind this is the best way to do this: Spinning a spinner on a dremel drill against a semi-wet paint brush, until a likeable effect is achieved: Here the off-white "sky" was applied last to "take in" the dark grey, as the dark grey wanted to splutter at first: It was not easy, but once in while you hit just the right "viscosity" of whitish paint, and then you have to stop. My model here had unfixable symmetry issues, so I took the spinner off for a later Special Hobby Seafire XV build! (in Revell boxing) The Airfix Mk XII kit is among the most horrendous kits I have ever seen in accuracy, and what you see here of this kit bears little more resemblance to it than if I had started from a block of balsa wood... I got the tailplanes to match the wings, but then found out the wings themseves were crooked, owing to all the re-sculpting: Be warned... I chose to build it as it was the only Spitfire of the correct length at the time: Other non-Eduard/SH 1/48th Spitfires look better but are actually even worse in other ways... The Special Hobby Spits look quite nice, but have their wings (or the trailing edges at least) too far back by around 4 inches: Hopefully that will prove less of a fight than this... Gaston

This is because styrene sheets are not the same quality of plastic as the styrene used in most kits: You'll note Evergreen styrene sheets are usually much softer, yet less strong, than kit plastic when new, and will melt far more dramatically with liquid glue: They seem more porous inside, and are not identical at all to the plastic in most kits. The softness is to make them easier to work with than a kit's plastic I suppose... Also the injection moulding process of kits seems something way more forceful than plastic sheet rolling, and that could explain the difference... Many kits I own are made of plastic of over 40 years of age, and their properties are completely unchanged: Ask anyone who own Monogram kits of the 1960s: If still in the box, the plastic will feel no different after 50 years than a newer mould... Much more relevant seems to be the colour the plastic is moulded in(!): That feels more different than any issue of time... The real age issue is sunlight, and especially sunlight heat exposure: Sunlight creates a focussed surface temperature that will "dry out" the plastic (in depth, not just the surface), evaporating the humidity inside the plastic into a gas, and leaving behind tiny gas pockets within the plastic: Then, as the night cycle contracts the gas, the next daylight heating up will expand the newly created gas pockets again, causing the tiny pocket walls to disintegrate over time... Direct sunlight UV rays are of course corrosive, but might actually be less of an issue than you think if the model is painted thick or dark enough: Surface temperature caused by the sunlight will likely be the real killer of models, not UV rays... Kit Styrene is actually not the worse, and seems more stable over time compared to many other plastics... Without heat or sunlight, kit-quality styrene should be very stable, but will become more brittle over decades: This is obviously not an issue on an item that is not performing any actual physical work, but it might lead to snapped gear legs owing to the concentrated stresses: That is why I like the SAC metal gear legs, whatever their other faults may be... I think this is an issue like paper acidity, sold by microfilm companies to the library system: Yes over time the item becomes more brittle, but that doen't mean it will necessarily disintegrate.... Gaston

I think this might point to something being wrong with the way the application of decals is usually advised: Gloss-coating, setting solutions etc... To me, it seems the possiblity of silvering, which glossing doesn't seems to prevent every time, is a localized symptom of what is actually overall poor adhesion for the whole decal, with air trapped under the decal due to the decal glue being not being very dense (air being trapped in the decal's glue maybe): I use Solvaset (or Micro-sol on thinner decals) as a setting agent over/under directly on matte paint: The decal, attacked from both sides, is litterally "melted" into the more "meltable" porous paint... And with this combination, the decal glue becomes totally irrelevant to the adhesion...: They stick just as well upside-down!: To remove, once dry, would require stripping the paint! That the adhesion is better this way is evidenced by the absence of silvering despite the matte surface: No silvering ever... And the total impossibility to separate the decal from the paint... The downside is that the decals are attacked so aggressively so early that they only give you a very limited time before deforming as you try to move them around... This is far worse with German late-war open white crosses, because they have little pigment to resist deformation(!): I found the hard way that these can only be moved only once with this method!... Yikes! Gaston

I don't buy into color debates either. I did note colours will knock an aircraft down in some cases, and not in others, even though judges are not supposed to evaluate accuracy... What always surprised me as an aircraft modeller is the lack of thinning of trailing edges and prop blades: I'll never understand that, as it is I think the first thing anyone who doesn't know anything about models will look at to guess what is it made of: They see the thick trailing edges, and thick props blades, and some of them probably think: Oh, it's probably just wood or plastic... I'll concede on one thing: Getting near the actual scale for trailing edges is exponentially harder the closer you get, because the thinner the edge is, the straighter it has to be: Thinner edges emphasize wobbliness... I liquid glue the leading edge, but you can't liquid glue the cigarette-paper thin plastic trailing edges, so here unforgiving cyano gel glue has to be used in the most fragile place: I glue the leading edges first, and then close the wing "like a book" on the gel cyano trailing edges: This is actually the only way to do this that works, although I now often wedge the gel cyano tube tip into the wing's trailing edges "crack", and apply the glue "in the crack of the book": This seems to reduces the thick gel glue spilling outside... My impression is most modellers assume "in-scale" trailing edges are impossible to achieve (which is false), and so the convention has developped to not even try: It is neither accurate nor does it look good: The worst of both worlds... Gaston

Wow! What a great paint job! Superb looking kit for its age... G.

Thanks for pointing out who "Dr Asher" is mquan! As far as using Future as a sealer, Future does not really bond or seep into the porousity of the underlying layer, and will shrink unevenly depending on the surface: It can't compare to TS-13 at all... I would never use it for coating anything other than dipping canopies. It could be that decanting and airbrushing TS-13 will allow better control: If that works without changing its properties, it would make using it even better. I have a feeling the properties might be altered by the decanting, which I have noticed in other products before... There are people out there who do not (like me) use an airbrush, and who (like me) never will... I do use a spray gun, but other than that it's rattle cans (which typically have finer atomization than my spray gun!) or brush... As far as seeing the seams, the TS-13 clear gloss show flaws much better than primer if you shine light across it: It is thanks to my originally gloss coating of clear parts with it (which does occasionally work without frosting them, but which I would no longer do given that I now know about Future) that I found out the air is 1000X cleaner of dust particles atfter nightfall: The amount of visible trapped dust is reduced from thousands of dust points sticking to the surface to near zero not long after the sun goes down, because the sun's ray heat up surfaces and lift dust from them. For this reason alone I never do any kind of painting in direct sunlight, and I even avoid spraying in my windowless basement ever, as the air near an open upstairs window is much cleaner as soon as the night falls. Very cloudy rainy days are the only times I would ever consider spraying during daylight hours... Tamiya's fine primer is still porous and will absorp the paint of a metallic finish, particularly thin metallic paint, which is not what you want. The issue with primer is that on many of my builds, the amount of corrective work, and the size of the puttied surfaces, is such that by the time all flaws are corrected there is simply way to much primer, resulting in the destruction of details: This is why "Dr Asher" came up with a gloss primer for his 1/48th B-32, a model that is scratchbuilt using mostly 1/72 B-36 and 1/48th B-24 parts (!): If he had used primer there would be an eight of an inch of the stuff on it by the time he was done, and no way to get a good bare metal finish: He never would have succeeded with primer, I am quite sure of it... I have found that even on my uncorrected, but poor fitting, Monogram B-26 (deceptively sound of shape, minus a few errors, but unfortunately with an unfixable assymetrically "canted" left wing leading edge, which unredeemably killed it for me), by the time I was ready for paint the model it felt "soft" from all the Tamiya fine primer on it: It was essentially ruined before any paint ever even got near it, although the left leading edge issue made the whole problem rather moot... It was sadly not to be the last: My corrected front end on my GW P-61 ended up ruined the exact same way, and you can see the effect of the weak adhesion of primer on the window edges when unmasking the canopies on smash moulded clear parts (masked with bare metal foil quite carefully, never mind the removeable glue residue from bare-metal foil): You can see the uneven two-layered breaks caused by the weakened adhesion of the interfering white layer of primer: You can see how the paint flakes off the primer: There is primer on the back side of the flakes, but the weakness of the primer causes it to separate from itself: This would never have happened with gloss... On the top the window the unmasking breaks came off quite a bit cleaner, but the "edge" of primer is still visible, which is yet another one of the primer's huge disadvantages: Clear gloss would be invisible under the overlying paint on unmasked edges...: As far as well-fitting kits go, you can get away with thin layers of primer, but even with those I find the advantages of TS-13 gloss to be so great I fail to see any advantage to using regular primer. For Armor with flat surfaces and metallic parts, that is quite another story... Gaston PS. I also do not use gloss under decals, as floating them on a poodle of Solvaset or Microsol, over matte paint, seems superior to me in every respect, especially for adhesion and silvering. The only trouble is that it is unforgiving since there is limited time for moving them around, a fairly serious issue... So my aircrafts are glossed under the paint but not over it...

I've recently discovered that this Tamiya product makes a terrific primer, particularly on kits with many puttied areas. It shrinks into details (no pigments to carry) yet fills and seals porous areas (with polishing or a second coat) in a visible and predictable way... Regular primer will fill details after a few reapeated sandings, or even simply with a single thick coat, and on top of that it is porous itself: I would not use that again on aircrafts, particularly to check the blending-in of canopies, where mask removal revealed the weakening effect of the primer on the paint... Paint that is kept away from the plastic by a weak layer is weaker, since friable regular primer is a structurally weak barrier to the bonding, which is not the case of a TS-13 lacquer gloss coat... This for me is a huge advance in the appearance of my several putty-intensive kits, and it is useful for most airplane kits I would think... I got the idea from an article by a builder who went by the nickname "Dr Asher", for his 1/48th scratchbuilt B-32... On vehicles the flat surfaces are not so great for gloss, as it tends to run or poodle on these: I would not necessarily use that on a tank for instance... Also note TS-13 does not crinkle or attack opaque plastic (unlike the other colored lacquer sprays by Tamiya), but occasionally does frost clear plastic: Not quite a substitute for Future in that case... The only difficulty is getting, with the spray can, an even, fully wet coat without getting runs, but you can sometimes sop off the runs with minimal trouble if they happen... Remember, if you fear it is too thick as you spray on the model, that it shrinks to an incredible extent after fully curing, at least on the first coat: The runs are a bigger trouble than putting too much of this gloss on the first coat (puttied areas might need a second coat if they are not polished)... The panel lines sometimes disappear upon spraying when you spray enough to avoid the "orange peel" effect: The trick is to keep moving to avoid runs, and not worry about swamped detail: It will come back later with a vengeance... Note that flat surfaces like the wings must be kept at a very slightly diving angle, so that the clear does not poodle thicker on the trailing edges but at the leading edges, where the curvature will nullify the "poodling" effect... Another thing is to spray at night, as with this gloss you will notice the night air is much cleaner because the sunlight is not lifting the dust into the air by heating up surfaces... This gloss does sand very well when fully cured, so don't worry about trapped particles, but keep the impurities to a minimum, as sanding will clog the detail quickly if you do it on a large surface at once... Gaston P.S. Future itself is not as suitable for that purpose, as it doesn't shrink as much, and is not anywhere near as tough or sandable, since it tends to peel on sanding.

Their I-15/I-153 seems actually pretty good. Thin wings with very nice fabric effect. I do not miss most of their releases because of the thick wingtips, or thick entire wings! Many (but not all) of their kits look either like Hawker Typhoons in the wings, or like they could hardly fly (compared to the wings thickness of the original that is)... Gaston

In 1/48th they could still do: -A really good Sherman(!) -A really good Panther(!) -A really good King Tiger (!) They did do a really good 1/48th Jagdtiger, so KT of similar quality should not be outlandish... -A good Churchill!(!) -A good ISU 152 -A good SU-100 -A good Jagdpanzer IV -Any Japanese armor (!) -Any Italian armor (!) -Any modern or post-war armor (!) As can be seen, 1/48th has some way to go... Gaston

1/48th C-46 1/48th Pe-8 1/48th C-54 1/200 Yamato 1/200 Ise and Hyūga. The last pair of items would I think make for the coolest kits ever in all plastic history, bar none... A successful full-fledged 25 knot battleship, with four turrets (six originally!) and an aircraft carrier deck complete with elevator, capable of carrying and lauching 14 landplanes and 8 seaplanes... And quite a successful and very long career for both ships of the class! Nothing can beat this imho... I know the Nichimo Yamato exists, but for those considering it, just remember the Nichimo kit is not even in styrene, but is indended for RC and is entirely moulded in that PVC-type plastic... That should discourage a few of the more fearless types... The vastness of what could be done just shows how boring and timid most releases are... Even the 1:32 B-17G seems unimaginative compared to the above imho... Gaston

The new Airfix is way more accurate in the canopy than Hasegawa: It is the one to get by far, except for the limits of the version offered... G.

Duplicate post, sorry...

I made these comparisons in response to a thread elesewhere, and I just thought the data would be interesting to post here... This part of the discussion was sparked by the recent announcement of an upcoming 1/32 scale B-17G, which got me crunching some numbers as to what would be comparable in the smaller scale... If recent 1/32 releases are any guide, 1/48th could easily be a "classic 1930s airliners" scale, and even a viable small to mid-size modern airliner scale (not the transoceanic ones though): A Boeing 737 in 1/48th would be a very reasonable 59.6 cm in span and about the same in length: 23.4 inches, similar in length but much smaller in span the existing Monogram B-29, which goes in at 89 cm or 35 inches in wingspan... The 737 would thus be quite big in length, but otherwise reasonable in 1/48th, being a little under a Ju-52 in span, that old airliner being 23.9 inches... Nobody seems to have complained the Ju-52 was an unmanageable monster in size... And the price of that was about the same as that of a single-engine WWII fighter by Tamiya in the same scale (and far less than a similar Hasegawa fighter today)... If you can take a Ju-52, a 737 is only larger in length and heigth. Granted, the length and height is similar to a B-29, which is big, but many modellers have built those and do display them, despite the much bigger wings... Another easy to overlook aspect of modern airliners, that mitigates this larger fuselage size issue, is that their swept wings should allow a somewhat easier diagonal display than the more cumbersome straight wings of most prop types... Because of this, an Airbus A-320 might still be reasonable, but definitely more on the outer limits for length: 78 cm, but significantly less than that in span: 71 cm. 30 inches in length by 27 inches in width: Only about four inches more wingspan than a Ju-52, and still seven inches less than the 35 inches wingspan of the B-29... But the A-320 is really a bit beyond anything reasonable because of its fuselage length, if not by that much, taking into account the swept wings. With the Boeing 767, 1/48th really gets into unreal territory: Even the basic unstretched version is around 1 meter in span and length... The 747 is at 1.4 m length per 1.34 m. Or 55 inches by 52... Clearly out of the range of sanity... To illustrate just how non-versatile 1:32 scale is by comparison, the upcoming B-17G in 1/32 comes in at 98.7 cm in span(!), or nearly a meter of sheer styrene plastic mouldings across: About the same size as the transcontinental Boeing 767 in 1/48th... In addition, with straight wings projecting far forward, it is probably just as cumbersome to display as the 767 would be, despite its shorter 70 cm fuselage (vs one full meter on the 1/48th 767)... So if the above B-17G is not a problem, then 1/48th really is a potential airliner scale, minus the 747... (Unless 1/32nd scale comes out with a mainstream B-29!) I think if a 1/48th airliner had a genuine aura of excellence around it, without any after-market help necessary, every modeller would buy one just as a "one off" in their collection (probably to remain unbuilt, but manufacturers don't care about that)... As far modern 1/48th airliners go, there probably would be room in the market for only one or two of the medium size jet airliners: I would think one 737 and one 727 at most, plus maybe a Caravelle (for the European market) and a limited handful of smaller regional jets or turboprops, and that would be about it... But they would be the few kits of their kind (at best half a dozen), and most would have a huge selection of colourful liveries. And actual real windows would let you see some of the interior: Other scales can't really offer this... In Japan there is a huge selection of very obscure modern 1/32 Japanese buses, absolutely top-end in quality and complete with huge decal sheets and pre-cut window masks: They are $80-110 apiece, and the one I have (Hino S'elega "Super High Deck") is probably one of the most complete, accurate and high-tech kits I have ever seen... The market for a similar-quality 1/48th 737, even at twice that price range, should be far larger: How many of us have a relative or knows someone directly involved with one of those? Very likely a modeller would never build more than one or two, just like now few would build multiples B-29s or even B-17s in that scale... But the fact that they would be unique in the scale, and yet with a large choice of markings, would be a selling point in itself: Even military jet builders would enjoy having just one airliner to give a sense of scale to the rest of their collection... Because of this 1/48th Airliners could sell better than many think. Of course, compared to 1/144th, you better choose your 1/48th airline markings well, as I doubt you could spare the room to make many different schemes... Gaston

Actually, the idea of just moulding the entire front end in two clear halves sounds exactly like what is needed!: There is a center frame for the join down the middle... I was toying with the idea of treating opaque/transparent materials in the ususal separate way, but now it strikes me how wrong an approach that is: The clear parts clearly would benefit from removing the huge surrounding join.... These would be far too large clear pieces for me to smash-mould or vacu-form on my own, hence the idea of a vacu-form company is again dead on... Commercially, there's no way sales of such a scary and complicated correction set would reduce the cost of dealing with a company, since modelling standards for the B-29 hardly even recognize how badly done the kit is, even for the cowlings... I think I will either use smaller clear pieces, but more likely I will have to be content with the 50-70 putty tubes canopy master and re-done surrounding nose area section that I did to correct the B-24... At least there the horror is mostly concentrated in just one place... G.

I did an extensive online search for the nose cap diameter, and found a guy who owns one but only said it was "around five feet" in diameter. The Monogram kit is at five feet six inches, so 3 mm oversized to that, which is in line with what I expect, but obvioulsy a more precise measurement is needed... 3 mm in the nose cap diameter is an absolutely enormous difference, even taking into account the size of the model. To give an idea, even the very thick plastic of this kit is scarcely over 1.5mm thick... Still scratching my head on how to downsize the entire nose glass area... And to think the B-17G is practically dead-on straight from the box... Gaston

Yes I looked at 1/144 kits, and usually they don't have it, or the taper starts in front of the turret. To be fair to the Monogram kit, there is some very slight taper (unlike what my white outline shows), but it starts only in front of the turret as well, and is much too modest. I will try to get the actual diameter of the front nose cap just to see how far off is the 1/48th kit: This is of value, as I already know that the kit's overall fuselage diameter is correct. Gaston

I just discovered that the real B-29 has some sort of tapering of its front fuselage, or at least some kind of departure from the cylindrical that seems more pronounced for the upper half. I overlayed some white lines to reveal where the Monogram kit outlines are, but note this is reversed for the top fuselage "taper", where the white line follows the actual aircraft outline, while the Monogram kit follows the straight and paralell line in red above it. Of note is that both the plastic main canopy and the squadron/Falcon vacu-form replacement are lacking in profile curvature as well (as mildly depicted by my white line), and are also too large in diameter, as is the nose cap. This is a result of the kit's forward fuselage having no taper, and the front clear parts staying in proportion to that undiminished diameter. I have the strong impression most existing B-29 kits follow factory GA drawings which apparently (I'm told) don't reflect this front fuselage taper... One more warning against relying on drawings... This has stopped my build cold (for most modellers, it would quite frankly be more practical to simply ignore this), and my model will likely remain unfinished as this is (to my eyes, now that I see it) quite a severe issue. It would require not only re-shaping the whole front fuselage, but also scratchbuilding entirely new main canopy parts... Pretty hair-raising. Gaston P.S. Yet one of the reasons I am less interested in building Monogram's B-17G is that there is too little wrong with it... Go figure... G.

Thanks Gil, Usually when I point this out, and despite the photos, there are a lot of modellers who still question that there is anything of significance, or even that it carries over to all mouldings of this kit: However mouldings are hardly ever modified after being released, so I'm guessing the B-29s were like this from the first in 1977, and that Monogram counted on the kit's sheer size for this to be overlooked... Can't argue with success! Given how alignment is a big issue in contests, I'm guessing few Monogram B-29s ever made it very high in rankings... You might be glad to hear Monogram's superbly accurate B-17G has absolutely no such issues, and is still one of the most basically sound models ever in 1/48th. Unfortunately the Monogram B-26B in that scale has its left leading edge kinked sharply upwards, inboard of the engine nacelle, going to sharply downward outboard of the nacelle (unlike its own right wing and the real aircraft!), and there is apparently no reasonnably effective way I can think of of making the wings symmetrical on this issue, given the deeply "integrated" way the radiused material around the engine nacelle blends in with the leading edge... It is therefore doubly sad that large WWII kits in that scale have been quite rare for 30+ years, and that these particular old Monograms are seen as having "fulfilled" the market... In 1/48th WWII multi-engine types only the B-17G really lives up to that assesment. Gaston