PM 1/72 Ho 229 Nightfighter

 

Okay, this is a perfectly awful kit, but it was really cheap. PM is a kit manufacturer in Turkey. I'd built their 1/72 Ho 229 kit back in the '80s (when the company called itself Pioneer Models) and about a decade later they came out with this two-seat nightfighter version that never flew.

I did a little scratchbuilding and added a couple of figures from the spares box. I also elected to show it in flight, partly because the landing gear on this kit is nothing to look at. I made a base from Sculpey and 1/8" acrylic rod.

Finish is RLM 74/75 on top, black underneath. One thing that went wrong along the way was I lost one of the two fairings from the engine fronts, so I chucked a piece of styrene rod in my drill press and used it as a lathe to form a replacement. Then I lost the other kit part and the replacement I'd made, so I ended up making three of them. The carpet monster has the others. Gotta admire that carpet monster! He can eat just about anything I drop, up to at least an inch in size, and he doesn't even need carpet to hide in. He manages to maintain total invisibility on the bare concrete of my workshop floor.

Pitot tube is 1/32" brass tubing with a bit of brass rod superglued in the end.

No Kum-Sok's MiG-15 to Freedom

 

Eduard kit 7424 1/72 MiG-15bis (Weekend Edition)

History

Back in the mid 1980s, I was working on my BS in aeronautical engineering at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach. The professor for my drafting course was a man named Kenneth Rowe. I didn't I know much about him at the time. I think I knew he was from Korea. He was a strongly-built, soft-spoken man, who taught the course more by demonstration on the board than by lecturing. He was a gifted teacher. I'd studied mechanical drawing in high school, and thought I knew my stuff, but I had a lot to learn from Mr. Rowe. One thing he showed us very clearly was how to do projections; that is, how to generate a view of an object from any desired direction using the views we already had. He especially made the process of doing projections really click with me. All of a sudden, my mind's eye changed! Previously, my mind's eye was something like a flat piece of paper, with flat pictures on it. He helped change my mind's eye into a three-dimensional space, where I could fold the "paper" around a three-dimensional object to capture sight lines and describe the object from any direction. It's not really an exaggeration to say that Mr. Rowe taught me how to see, and it's been a huge help to me ever since, one of the most valuable things anyone ever taught me. Back then, even CAD drafting was mainly 2D, and the third dimension needed to be in the draftsman's head, but since the late '90s, I've done most of my CAD work in 3D, and even with the computer screen, I wouldn't be able to visualize what I was doing without what he taught me.

The following semester, I was talking about him to another student who said, "Don't you know? He's the guy who flew the MiG-15 down from North Korea and defected!" Wow! Mr. Rowe was in fact someone famous to me, not by name (I didn't know the name No Kum-Sok) but by his daring act. I grew up with aviation stories, mostly from my dad, and knew all about American WW2 fighter aces and so on, and also knew about a North Korean pilot who shortly after the armistice in 1953 dared to escape to freedom by flying his MiG-15 down to Kimpo Air Base and landing there. He was at serious risk of being shot down, either by his comrades or by the fighters and anti-aircraft batteries defending South Korea.

Over time, my modeling has come to be more about people and their stories, and not just about machines. Gradually the notion snuck into the back of my mind to build a model of Lt. No Kum-Sok in his MiG-15bis, just landed at Kimpo Air Base. Mr. Rowe wrote a book about his adventure (A MiG-15 to Freedom) that I found useful for this model, especially for modifying and painting the pilot figure. He describes his flight suit, which was mainly black leather with a black leather flying helmet, standard issue for Soviet pilots since WW2, and he mentions that as soon as he landed at Kimpo Air Base he pulled off his oxygen mask to breathe the sweet air of freedom. That may sound like a trite cliche to some people perhaps, but I have no doubt it falls utterly short of what he was feeling at the time.

An unfortunate side note is that the North Korean government executed several innocent people associated with him who had no involvement in his defection. This only underscores what a hellish place he escaped from.

The Kit

Scott Van Aken did a preview of this kit

. My impression is that it's beautifully molded but fiddly, not from excessive parts count or from parts too tiny to handle, but from the way it's engineered. More about this as I go into construction. The tooling dates from 2013 and Eduard's kits came a long way before that but have come a long way since. This kit provides parts that enable you to build different versions of the MiG-15bis, which like many aircraft went through production changes as old parts and assemblies were used up and new ones were substituted. In order to build the plane I had in mind, research was necessary to know when to follow the kit instructions and when not to. My research indicated the kit decals needed modification, and they were tough enough to stand up to it while being thin and lying down nicely.

Construction

Let me admit up front that I did a poor job on this model. I did my best to fix things, but it won't win any awards unless the IPMS starts giving out participation trophies. I fouled up in part due to trying new things, which is a sure-fire way of wrecking a model. This build marks my first use of Alclad II, of Perfect Plastic Putty, and of washi tape. I also tried out a product for rigging, some 0.03mm (.0012") diameter copper wire by Thomas' Modelworks, a gift from my friend Sunny Lam (a fellow member of Delaware Valley Scale Modelers) that he brought back from one of his trips to Hong Kong. I also had a horribly cluttered workbench the entire time. But the first problem was the imperfect fit, starting with the cockpit, disrupting the fit of subsequent assemblies.

As is customary, assembly starts with the cockpit. In the case of the MiG-15, however, the jet intake splits around the cockpit and nosegear well, and the inner faces of the intake ducting, represented by parts C43 and C37, form the cockpit sidewalls. Since these need to fit within the fuselage halves, any error here will tend to pry the fuselage halves apart later, which is exactly what transpired. I knew this plane would be a tail-sitter, so I put bits of lead in the space available as far forward of the main gear as possible, secured with superglue. I expect this was where I went wrong. Anyway, I continued with assembly and painting of the cockpit and nosegear bay. One might expect the MiG-15 cockpit color to be that turquoise color that we associate with Russian aircraft (which they supposedly use because it helps aircrews remain calm but alert), but at that time the paint used on interior surfaces was a somewhat bluish medium grey. I used photos of the very aircraft I was modeling, which resides at the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson AFB, to estimate the color as I mixed it using what acrylic paints I had on hand.

Since a pilot figure was mandatory to show the moment when Lt. No was taxying to a stop at Kimpo Air Base, I raided an Italeri kit for a pilot, which I modified by cutting off the arms and repositioning them. I also made an oxygen mask and hose, and put these on the figure but unsnapped from the flight helmet on one side. It came as a surprise to me that MiG pilots during the Korean War were still wearing old leather flying helmets, but hey, building models can be educational! One feature Eduard left in this Weekend Edition kit is the "super fabric" harness, which I applied over the pilot figure.

Assembly moved on to the fuselage, which as I stated, didn't quite fit together with the cockpit assembly inside. I only discovered this when I tried to fit the lip of the intake (part C46) onto the front. Some sanding and rescribing of panel lines ensued. Next came the wing. Try as I might, it didn't fit right on the left side. (Note: one problem with plastic aircraft models is that they get us talking about "left" and "right" wings, and considering them to be two wings. Real aircraft and flying models are not built this way. The wing goes straight through for structural reasons, and most of us modelers have experienced structural failure of plastic models due to the load on the wing prying the fuselage apart. In the case of the MiG-15, the structure is a little more complicated: the front half of the wing goes straight through, splitting the two intake ducts into four, but the rear spar attaches to a ring-shaped fuselage frame right in front of the engine, so the four separate ducts recombine into one duct before the engine inlet.)

Anyway, I trimmed away excess material from the slot and tab where the "left wing" attached, but never got a perfect fit. I also used a simple fixture for getting the correct dihedral angle (or in the case of the MiG-15, anhedral angle). This was something I'd built out of two scraps of wood held together with a screw and a wingnut. I measured the anhedral angle from a drawing in Squadron-Signal's MiG-15 in Action by Hans-Heiri Stapfer. I also noticed the kit's wing doesn't quite match the plan view in the book, but I don't know whether the error lies in the kit or the book, or a little of both.

Lt. No's MiG, Red 2057, didn't have all the features of later production aircraft, and I had to choose parts included in the kit to reflect this. For starters, the landing light was still in the top of the center fairing in the front of the split intake, and not the retractable unit in the lower left wing root as in later aircraft. This meant I had to use the alternate parts that Eduard includes, part A9 instead of C28 for the intake splitter and B9 instead of B10 for the lower left wing half. (I'll just mention the few other differences right here, that this particular MiG had no IFF antenna on top of the fuselage, and had a T-antenna configuration with the aerial wire going from the top of the mast to the top of the tail, with a lead going to a connector behind the right side of the cockpit. Many MiGs simply had a wire going from this connector to the top of the tail. Also, as far as I can tell from photos, it has unspoked main gear wheels. Next time I get to the Air Force Museum, I may find out I'm wrong about this.)

Assembly progressed to the smaller bits like landing gear, but only after applying the natural metal finish. Here was another fiddly aspect of this kit. The doors covering the main gear struts, as on many aircraft, are split into two panels to allow for the compression of the strut. The lower panel is rigidly fastened to the strut and the upper is hinged to the lower wing with a link connecting to the strut to swing it clear of the lower panel as the gear comes down. For some inscrutable reason, instead of making this link come off the strut at the correct angle, Eduard asks the modeler to bend it so it will meet the upper panel at the right place. No doubt this decision has elicited cursing in English, Czech, and many other languages. The cylinders for actuating the main gear (parts C22 and C23) are the most delicate parts in this kit. I broke one and fixed it, not perfectly, but kudos to anyone who can tell from my photos which one it is.

The main gear also are designed to avoid a cheat lots of model manufacturers have used: the top of the strut is a peg that fits into a recess molded into the landing gear bay in upper wing half. This makes assembly easier, but if the real thing were assembled this way, how would the gear retract? Instead, Eduard has shows the hinge pin of the real thing, which makes a T at the top of the strut, and their cheat is a third pin that disappears between the wing halves after assembly. Unfortunately, this calls for really tight assembly tolerances for the upper and lower wing halves to provide a good fit for the landing gear, but you're not necessarily going to notice the fit problem until it's too late. As a result, one of my main gear struts had a rather wobbly fit. I aligned it by eye and hoped it'd stay put after the glue dried, and so far so good, knock wood.

The sliding section of the canopy is a three-piece affair with optional parts (why, I wonder) for open and closed options. A pin on its bottom causes the open canopy to stick up at an improbable angle, so I trimmed this off before attaching it with white glue.

I left off the antenna mast and pitot tube until I was completely done with decals and weathering, but I'll mention this step here instead of coming back to it. The pitot goes into a hole between the wing halves, but the antenna mast just gets glued onto the fuselage inside a small scribed rectangle. A dab of gel superglue, some accelerator applied with a liner brush, and then don't even breathe on it! The wire aerial needed to have a more secure purchase, so I drilled tiny holes in the top of the tail and where the lead comes into the fuselage, and stuck the fine copper wire in wrapped around a length of stretched sprue with gel superglue on it. The copper wire, at .0012", comes out to less than 3/32" at this scale. The connector on the fuselage actually sticks out into the airstream, so I left the stretched sprue stick out a bit there. It took many attempts to make the T-antenna, but finally I got the other bit that goes to the mast knotted on and secured with Micro Liquitape from now-defunct Krasel Industries, a water-soluble pressure-sensitive adhesive. Finally there still ended up being a little slack in the wire, but I was no longer willing to put additional effort into this. I'll just follow Ed Wood's philosophy: "My next one will be better."

 

Colors & Markings

As stated above, this was my first time using Alclad II. I chose White Aluminum over a base of their "Black Primer and Microfiller." In all cases I used my aged Paasche VL at about 15 psi. I'd already brush-painted the tailpipe with Metalizer exhaust, and put a stick up the tailpipe to hold the model while spraying. The primer coat had some rough spots that I dealt with using K&S sanding films. It took a several thimblefulls of the aluminum to cover the aircraft completely, and after the third I realized I should have cleaned the nozzle. A little blob of the stuff landed on the underside of the right aileron. It's lacquer, so when I removed the blob, there was a divot in the aileron. This I filled with Perfect Plastic Putty. This is one product new to me that caused no trouble at all. It's a thick acrylic paste that does not attack styrene at all, and cleans up with water. I heartily recommend it. I also masked and painted the canopy, sans primer. The Alclad went onto the transparent parts without issue, the harder clear styrene probably being less susceptible to being attacked by lacquer thinner. The sliding portion of the canopy I masked with washi tape, which was a laborious process. The fixed portion, with its tighter curves, I masked with Liquitex Gloss Super Heavy Gel. This I did with lots of magnification, good lighting, and a fine liner brush. My verdict is that as long as there's a scribed line on the canopy to paint the gel up to, it makes masking a breeze. It peels off easily, too, leaving no residue. I also used it to mask the landing light in the nose.

I masked off a few areas and painted them with Alclad II dull aluminum (the nose) and dark aluminum (blast plates in front of the guns, dive brakes, and access panels). I also cheated and used some Testors Metalizer with a brush to highlight some panels. The Alclad gives a tough finish, but the amount of handling the model received caused it to wear off in spots, especially on the wing leading edge. This I touched up with Metalizer Non-Buffing Aluminum.

The markings were a combination of kit decals for national markings and number decals for the "2057" on the nose from Smer "MiG-15 USAF" kit number 0933. I could have used national markings from the latter kit, but by my estimation, their slightly larger size didn't match Red 2057's markings. It's hard to discern from period photos, but it looks to me like the outer blue ring on Red 2057's national markings is stenciled in five parts, like the inner red ring, not four as on some other North Korean aircraft and on the kit decals for both kits. This is how it's represented on the restored aircraft at the Air Force Museum, and I believe the guys who restored the plane must have access to the best photos. As a result, I modified the kit decals. I filled in all the gaps in the blue ring but for the top one using a GSI Creos Gundam marker that matched the color almost perfectly (no, I'm not into Gundam, but the price was right and they come in handy). Then I used a sharp No. 11 blade to cut the new gaps in the ring. Even with the abuse I put these decals to, they behaved nicely. Maybe this thing with the decals is a small detail, but if you aren't into small details, what the heck are you building models for anyway?

I didn't bother checking the accuracy of the "2057" markings from Smer's decal sheet until after they were on, since they were all I had and it wouldn't have been feasible to modify them. In comparing them to photos of the actual aircraft, I noticed they're about 10% too wide and the numerals aren't quite the right shape, particularly the "2." If ever I do this subject again, perhaps I'll need custom printed decals.

Next came light weathering. This was a wash of Polly Scale grey and brown from my dwindling stock, mostly wiped off just to give the impression of use.

I stopped painting tires black ages ago, since they aren't really black, and my current go-to paint for tires is Vallejo Model Color German Grey, which I lighten a bit for the tread area. Eduard made painting the tires a breeze for the main gear, since the hubs are separate parts, but the nosewheel and strut are all one piece, so you need either super careful masking or a really steady hand. I opted for the latter. A steady hand mostly relies on resting the hand on the workpiece, so the only thing moving is the fingers holding the brush (or whatever tool you're using).

To provide a display base that looks like Kimpo Air Base in 1953, I used Italeri kit No. 1327 "Pierced Steel Planking." It comes with other airfield accessories that I haven't used yet, and seems geared toward a WW2 diorama. I've read that a different pattern of PSP came out by the Korean War but it was still steel. I figure it's close enough to the runway matting then in use a Kimpo. I gave it a shot of black automotive primer and drybrushed it heavily with Model Master Schokoladenbraun enamel, which I scrubbed with a toothbrush to burnish it till it had the look of corrosion-resistant steel. Along the edge it seems to have mud deposited over the matting by erosion, with some overscale footprints I puttied over, and I painted this various shades of brown and yellow and added Woodland Scenics foliage and some dried tea leaves pressed into Liquitex Gloss Super Heavy Gel. It will come in handy for photographing other models, too.

Conclusions

Eduard's 1/72 MiG-15 family of kits are a big step up from what came before in this scale. I can speak to two others from my stash, the rivety old KP kit recently reboxed by Smer and the later DML kit with its modern tooling but completely incorrect wing planform. I haven't looked for inaccuracies in Eduard's kit, since that tires me out, but did notice the wing fillet is incorrectly shaped but looks right for a MiG-15UTI, the trainer version. It's also a fiddly kit, with challenging assembly that requires a lot of test fitting. More than once I encountered fit problems as a result of prior subassemblies that had apparently gone together well.

I'm glad I finally tried Alclad II, and intend to go on using it. It's durable compared to Metalizer and forms a coat more like paint. I was careful to respect it, since it's lacquer, the natural enemy of styrene, so I made sure to apply light coats with my airbrush. I did experiment with brush painting it, as I do with Metalizer on small parts like pitot tubes, but this didn't work at all. There wasn't nearly as much difference between White Aluminum and Dark Aluminum as I expected, but there's quite a contrast between those and Dull Aluminum. I also brushed Metalizer over Alclad, just to give contrast to a few panels without the need of masking, and was happy with the results. Metalizer isn't quite as hot stuff as lacquer, and seems not to attack the Alclad.

Perfect Plastic Putty is great stuff and I recommend it.

Thanks to Sunny Lam for the rigging wire. I'll have to use it to rig some biplanes and waterline ships next!

And thanks most of all to Mr. Rowe for being a great teacher, and for writing a book about his adventure. It's a good read.

References

No, Kum-Sok. A MiG-15 to Freedom. McFarland & Company, 1996.

Stapfer, Heinz-Heiri. MiG-15 in action. Aircraft Number 116, Squadron/Signal Publications, 1991.

https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/196115/mikoyan-gurevich-mig-15bis/

https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/196377/the-story-of-the-mig-15bis-on-display/

 

Polishing a Turd, or Setting the Bar Low

Somehow, I had this Monogram snap-together Spitfire kit lying around (I never belonged to their Young Model Builders' Club) and decided the best way to get rid of it was to build it. It's not much of a kit, with stickers instead of decals. I guessed at first it was 1/72 scale, but I measured the wingspan and found it about 10% oversize for 1/72, which makes it approximately 1/64, which is the scale that Scalemates . Anyhow, I'd already decided to use some Scale-Master decals I had saved from an old Encore kit that I let my daughter complete the way she wanted when she was about 3 years old. (She painted it red and pink.)

This wasn't going to be a serious build, just something to hang up in my workshop. The markings I chose were for P7666, call letters EB-Z, a presentation aircraft from the Observer Corps, the personal aircraft of Sqn. Ldr. Donald Osborne Finlay of No. 41 Squadron in late 1940.

I printed out the camo pattern sized to the model and cut a template. I traced this and brush-painted it over black primer using some Humbrol acrylics that came with an Airfix kit. These tiny plastic vials of paint are tricky to stir without spilling and the weight of the lid makes them want to tip over, but they go on nicely with a brush and as far as I can tell accurately represent RAF colors. A little internet research gave me to understand that in the early years of WWII, the underside color of RAF day fighters was usually Sky Blue, aka Duck Egg Blue. Less commonly used was Sky, aka Sky Type S or Duck Egg Green (or a similar but lighter and greener color Eau-de-Nil). Least common was Sky Grey, normally used by the Fleet Air Arm and Coastal Command, but apparently this color was used by No. 41 Squadron. This color was more of neutral grey than the others, lacking their bluish or greenish hue, so I used some Testors Flat Camouflage Grey acrylic I had since it seemed a fair match.

As I recall, the Encore kit (from a Heller mold) is a little overscale, say 1/69, so the decals I used should be sized accordingly. At any rate, while the markings are still undersized for the Monogram kit, the only place it really shows is the tail flash, which is clearly too short.

I wanted to use this kit to try out washi tape for the first time. I masked the canopy with it and found the results satisfactory. I also masked off the red rectangles on the leading edge of the wing where tape was applied over the gunports, but I'd have gotten better results here just freehanding it. The washi tape also lifted a decal. Ouch! I touched it up with a Gundam marker.

The kit's representation of the main gear and their bays is laughable, and I wanted it to show it in-flight anyway, so I cut out the shallow bays to modify it so the gear are retracted. This left peg holes that I filled, and would have required even more work to show the gap where the top of the door doesn't quite cover the bay, but it wasn't worth the effort.

I also tried ways to avoid decal silvering. Decal silvering is the bane of my existence, though I must admit it's not too horrible a bane, as banes go. I gave the plane a coat of Future and used Micro Sol to wet the areas where I applied the decals, then more Micro Sol, and rolled a Qtip over the decal to press out the excess. Mostly it worked, but I also carefully chipped away clear carrier film with the tip of a #11 blade, used a pointy brush to get more Micro Sol or Micro Crystal Clear under the decal, and touched up with paint. And I still see a few little flecks of silvering. Aaarghhh!

So now I have a Spitfire hanging in my workshop. If it were some kind of masterpiece, I might find a safer place for it, but this way it livens up my workshop. Besides, if I decide I don't like it anymore, I can always stuff it full of firecrackers, like back in the good ol' days.

Hasegawa 1/72 Isuzu TX-40 Fuel Truck and Toyota GB Starter Truck

Speaking of gems, these must be the crown jewels of Hasegawa's 1970s braille scale vehicles. National pride really encourages model companies to do their best tooling!

Both first came out in 1974, according to Scalemates. The molding is so good, I decided to do some detailing on each in an effort to get the whole model up to the quality of the basic kit. The starter truck has rigging added to the boom that supports the drive shaft that spins the aircraft prop, and a bit of chain to hold up the drive shaft, like on the real thing. I also added canvas doors to the sides of the cab, made from paper and cellophane, glued with Micro Crystal Clear and painted with Humbrol. I wanted the starter truck to appear older, so it's much more heavily weathered than the fuel truck, and painted in a different tan color.

The fuel truck has a refueling hose made of solder, with a nozzle I fabricated from various bits, made to scale from drawings I found online. Both vehicles have windshield wipers I made from tiny slivers of styrene. I dirtied up the windshields with extremely thinned enamel and used a toothpick to clean the dirt away as the windshield wipers would do.

Hasegawa bills the fuel truck as Japanese Army/Navy, but of course it's got the Army star, not the Navy anchor. I've got another of these in my stash that's going to get the star shaved off and replaced with an anchor, then be painted blue to represent a naval fuel truck. The starter truck is simply billed as army, and I don't know offhand whether the Japanese Navy used them. None of the images of Toyota starter trucks in my references shows one in naval service.

Oh, by the way, the starter truck this kit represents may not be a GB. According to the Wikipedia article, it is instead a KC, a version simplified for wartime production. However, the article also states that the KC had a plywood cab (the kit clearly represents a steel cab) and that the KC wasn't produced before November 1943. Japanese Army Air Force Aces 1937-1945 by Henry Sakaida shows a good photo of a Toyota starter truck starting a Ki-27, and it looks exactly like this kit. The caption makes the credible claim that it's 1939. At any rate, the photo cannot have been taken as late as November 1943!

So these models are another example of the unplanned impulse modeling than can result from raiding kits for parts: I needed a figure for my Fine Molds midget sub, and converted one to represent the sub's captain, but also built these kits I was raiding. The included figures are obviously in army uniforms. And nicely sculpted figures they are! More national pride at work, no doubt.

...and Braille Scale Kettenkrad

And here's the 1/72 Kettenkrad that comes with the Schwimmwagen in the Hasegawa kit (31113, originally MB-103). Not much to say about this, other than I'm still using up stocks of Polly Scale paints (Panzer Yellow and Grimy Black, to mention two). The seated figures that come with it are pretty awful, but there's a standing figure who might be usable. I won't embarrass Hasegawa by showing you what the figures look like. Instead, here's another of their early vehicle models, from 1973! Sure, it's simplified (the front wheel and fork are one piece, as are each of the two track and wheel assemblies), but actually it's quite a little gem, with nice detail and just a bit of seam lines and flash.



It was a really quick build, but at least I took the time to clean up these minor defects where visible. The instruments are painted black with these nifty Gundam markers I got on sale cheap at the Dragon USA online store, which seems not to have much inventory anymore, but that's another story.

Anyhow, I like these little multi-kits. They're like little dioramas in a box, or playsets if you like to move them around the workbench while making "vrrroom" noises.

Braille scale Schwimmwagen

Raiding other model kits for figures - and in this case, just an arm - I broke into Hasegawa's 1/72 Schwimmwagen/Kettenkrad set. I was cobbling together a pilot figure for Eduard's 1/72 MiG-15 bis (more about that in a future post). Anyhow, opening a kit to steal parts from it leaves you open to the impulse to just build the damn thing, especially if it's a quick easy build. Maybe you're different, but without impulsivity I don't think I'd ever build models. We'll see if I get the impulse to build the Kettenkrad, too.
Marking options include army, SS, and Luftwaffe, so I went with Luftwaffe, since it might come in handy in some future diorama. I left out the driver figure, since it's sort of a misshapen blob with an oversized head. As you can see, the decal on the driver's side of the tub just sort of disintegrated. To help cover up this defect, I abandoned the plan to leave the whole thing in solid Panzer Yellow (one of the Polly S paints I still have) and brushpainted some camo with Model Master enamels (Panzer Red-brown and Panzer Green). The canvas top started out Humbrol Deck Teak, but it seemed too close to Panzer Yellow, so I overpainted it with Humbrol Hemp. The top lacks a rear window, which would have been clear vinyl on the real thing, so I glued on a piece of envelope window with Micro Crystal Clear. It's like Elmer's only better, and I used it to glue on the license plates from the decal sheet. (Yes, that's what instructions tell you to do, too.) Tires are Vallejo German Grey lightened in areas with Medium Sea Grey - my go-to method of painting tires.

Quick work. So there you have it. Not the best Schwimmwagen model out there (why do the blackout covers on the headlights have their slits at odd angles? And the propeller and prop guard are molded as one piece that's merely a suggestion of what should be there). The whole thing is barely two inches long, but it looks enough like a Schwimmwagen that I'm happy with it.

Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki's Really Bad Day

December 7, 1941 didn't work out the way Ensign Sakamaki planned. He and nine others were assigned to five midget submarines that were to infiltrate Pearl Harbor and fire a total of ten torpedoes at American warships. If they managed to survive, they were expected to commit suicide rather than be captured. None of the crew were volunteers. Sakamaki and the others were chosen because they came from families large enough to spare one son.

Sakamaki's midget sub, Ha-19, ran into numerous difficulties even before launching from submarine I-24. The gyrocompass didn't work from the start. The boat kept running aground on a reef near the entrance to Pearl Harbor and only came off when she was shelled by destroyer USS Helm (DD-388), which continued the attack with depth charges. Part of the time, Sakamaki was knocked unconscious, leaving his only crewman, Petty Officer Kiyoshi Inagaki, in charge. After another attempt to enter Pearl Harbor and running aground again, the cumulative damage to the boat prevented either torpedo from being fired and allowed seawater into the batteries, filling the boat with toxic fumes. Sakamaki had no choice but to abort the mission and try to rendezvous with I-24, but this would prove impossible. The midget sub ended up on Waimanalo Beach around the eastern tip of Oahu, near the location later used as the site of Robin Masters' estate on Magnum, P.I. Inagaki died that day, like the crews of the other four midget subs. Sakamaki ended up unconscious on the beach and woke up in a military hospital as a prisoner of war, the first captured by the United States in WWII. He asked permission to commit suicide, but of course this was denied, and he spent the entire war as a POW. After the war, he was a committed pacifist. He worked for the Toyota Motor Corporation, heading their operations in Brazil from 1969-1983. So although he may not have been enjoying life on December 7, 1941, it turns out to have been his lucky day.

The model is Fine Molds 1/72 A-Target Type A Midget Submarine, available from Hobby Link Japan. The official nomenclature seems to have been 甲標的甲型 Kō-hyōteki kō-gata, which, if I'm using Google Translate right, simply means "Target A, Type A." The label was evidently an attempt to hide its real purpose, like the British label of "tank" during WWI. The kit is really nice, but I made some modifications based on photos I found of the captured Ha-19 as well as other midget subs of this class. It does not include a figure, so I stole one from Hasegawa's 1/72 Toyota Starter Truck. I cut apart his left arm and left hand reposed them and used a bit of putty to convert his tropical Army uniform to a Navy winter uniform.

The rigging of the sub wasn't covered in the instructions, so I did some research. Eyebolts shown in the instructions on top of the forward hull don't show up on Ha-19, so I filled the holes with putty. A net-clearing cable, apparently about one inch in diameter, goes from the bow to a pulley the top of the sail and is tensioned with a turnbuckle anchored with chain to an eyebolt on top of the hull immediately before the sail. I used one of the kit eyebolts and some chain, and fabricated the turnbuckle from plastic rod and wire. The net-clearing wire I made by twisting several strands of fine copper wire to achieve a scale one-inch thickness. Another cable runs from the periscope fairing to the tailfin.

To prevent nets from hanging up on the periscope fairing, a U-shaped steel frame goes over the top of the sail. This part is included in the kit, but there are also two bent rods welded on top of this and to the top of the periscope fairing. I fabricated these from bits of wire and superglued them on.

As for finish, the paint is mostly Krylon black primer with a coat of Future for the decals and some flat coat and Vallejo black, with some metallic copper and gold for the contrarotating screws on both the sub and the torpedo.