For my first
submission to ARC, I chose to feature an aircraft that surprisingly has not yet
appeared on these pages, the C-141 Starlifter. This is the boxscale Aurora
kit that was released in the late 1960's. This is actually my second
attempt to build this kit. I purchased my first attempt on Ebay for a
hefty price and then proceeded to ruin the kit with my at the time modest
modeling skills. After my skills improved, I snatched a second Starlifter
on Ebay. As expected, this kit is very difficult to build due to the poor
fit and the brittle plastic. The seam that results from joining the two
fuselage halves together was extremely difficult to remove but I did the best I
could and I'm happy with the result. For some reason, this plastic
does not sand very easily.
Click on
images below to see larger images
Detail is also lacking with
bare wheel wells and no panel lines at all. Doors and
flaps are deeply engraved. For painting, I initially sprayed the
aircraft with a primer coat of Testors Flat Dark Aircraft Gray.
This helped me clean up any remaining seams. I then masked
off the gray (which the instructions incorrectly state should be white) portions
on the wings and tailplanes and sprayed the aircraft overall with Testors
Metallic Silver. I'm not too picky with my NMF's. Spraying
overall silver is usually good enough for me, but if I were to build
this kit a third time (which isn't going to happen given the high
price of this kit!) I would try to put on different metallic shades
over the aircraft. For the black walkways, I used masking tape and a
Sharpie. The decals are a combination of the kit decals and some
from the spares box. The MAC tailbands, US flags, serial numbers,
and MAC emblems came from the kit, but I had to use Microscale Liquid
Decal Film in order to make them usable. I then brushed on a few
coats of Future. I believe the fuselage just behind the wings should
be painted black. I'll get around to that eventually.
On a historical note, this particular Starlifter
(63-8077) met a sad fate. It crashed August 28, 1973 on approach to
Torrejon AB, Spain with the loss of all hands save one.
Overall, I was pleased with how this kit
turned out and I would recommend it to anyone. It's definitely not up
to today's standards, but it's the only large injection-molded Starlifter out
there. The DML/Testors/Italeri 1/200 kit is a bit too small for my
liking. My primary reference for this build was Warbird
Tech Volume 39: Lockheed C-141 Starlifter by Frederick A. Johnsen.
Tony Granata
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