
One of my many aspirational goals, going back over 20 years, is a small collection of my favorite World War II aircraft in 1/72 scale. I have been buying the kits all the time, but since starting on several U. S. Navy carrier aircraft during law school, haven't finished the ones I started, much less built any others. Part of the problem is that my airbrushing skills are abysmal, so that the final stage of painting and decaling is where I stop.
The aircraft that I am most interested in are carrier aircraft, but I also have an interest in some of the European theater fighters and bombers. One of the transitional aircraft, in that it is not a true carrier aircraft, is the B-25 Mitchell medium bomber, which was the plane used by the Doolittle Raiders in April 1942. I started on the model of a B-25 20 years ago, but never finished it - and now I am glad. While at King's Hobby in Austin a couple of weeks ago, I picked up a new 1/72 scale B-25 when I realized that it was significantly smaller than the one I have been working on. At first, I thought that I had mistakenly been building a 1/48 scale model, but when I got back to Marshall, I realized that the kit that I was working on was so old that it was a "box scale" kit by Revell – released in the 1950's before kits standardized into certain scales. It said that it was a 1/72 scale model, but a little research on the Internet indicated that that was language that was added later – the kit itself was actually 1/66. The picture above shows the difference between older kid, which is partially assembled, and new one. Well, I certainly don't want a B-25 that is 1/66 scale, so I gladly abandoned it for the new kit.

So today, I opened up the new kit and started work. The first step is to clean the workbench in the workshop (which Grayson has been using to build computers) and wash all the parts in soapy water to eliminate any mold release, which would interfere with the paint adhering to the plastic later on. Next, as it has been literally decades since I have worked on a plane models,

I decide to start by painting the smaller parts. While the parts were drying I pulled my references on B-25s to get a better idea what colors I should be using, and put them on the Levenger study desk I got for this purpose some years ago. Of course the first color for any plane has to be zinc chromate green for the interior, and I followed that with various blacks, grays and silvers, and started putting together the various sub assemblies - cockpit, engines and landing gear.

I finished for the day by spray painting the fuselage and wings olive drab using spray cans I bought to paint the B-25s for a 1/350 USS Hornet model at least 12 years ago. I'll start assembling the parts tomorrow and see how far I get.