1/48 Koster Martin Maryland |
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Gallery Article by Ivan Pliopas
on July 14 2003 |
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France National Day
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The
Martin Maryland was created in response to a 1938 U.S. Army Air Corps request
for a twin engine light attack aircraft. Other designs entering that same
competition were, what later would become, the A-20 and the B-25. Although
Martin ended up building a prototype of the Maryland for evaluation purposes,
the plane never saw front line service with the American Armed Forces. Instead,
it was in the hands of French, British and South African pilots that the
Maryland had its moments of glory. In French service, it was know as
“Glenn”, and was used by both the Armée de l’Air (Army) and Aéronavale
(Navy), virtually from the beginning until the end of WWII. No Maryland is known
to have survived to this day.
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The
Koster vac-formed Maryland builds into a nice replica overall. I have not
checked the kit dimensions, but the model looks right when finished, at least
compared to pictures. It is not very difficult to build, but I would not
recommend it as a first vac-formed project, Assembling the transparencies, for
example, can be a bit tricky. The kit contains some parts in resin, but these
suffer from inaccuracies and lack of detail in some areas (for example, cockpit
and nose interior), as well as bubbles (my sample, at least, had this problem).
In any case, these items serve as a good basis to add further detail to the
model.
I’ve
built my Maryland mostly out-of-the-box. The main improvements that I’ve added
were: 1) detaching the rudder and dropping the elevators, 2) replacing the kit
engine fronts with resin items from Engine & Things, 3) opening the cowl
flaps, and 4) scratchbuilding the upper turret MAC 34 twin machine gun. The
model was finished using Lifecolor acrylic paints and decals from my spare box.
The dolphin insignia was done in Corel Draw and printed in a White decal sheet
using a laser printer.
The
machine depicted is Glenn number 202 belonging to Escadrille 7B (French Navy)
operating out of Beirut in July 1941. A side view color profile of this plane
can be found in the French magazine Aéro Journal, issue 8 (Aug-Sept 1999), page
19.
Overall,
this was a very enjoyable project; it took me almost one year to complete
working an average of 4-6 hours only on weekends.
Ivan Pliopas
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