Added 10/04/2006

Curtis P-36F SurfHawk.

Here's another build of mine for your site. This
was done for the Airfix GB over on the What If
modeller's board : http://www.whatifmodelers.com/

The base kit for this was the 1/72 Airfix P-40E. The
cowling, engine and prop were from a Fokker D.XXI and
the floats are from an Airfix Ar-196. The backstory is
that the Netherlands East Indies needed a counter to
the much feared Japanese Rufe floatplane fighter and
approached the Curtiss Co. in 1940 for idea. Curtiss
saw this as an opportunity to test their new six-gun
wing which was slated for later P-40 variants.

This build went together fairly easily. The only major
work apart from attaching the new powerplant was
cutting off the leading edge bumps for the landing
gear and puttying over the gap and filling in the
wheel wells with plastic card.


 
&

A-13 Strike Shrike

Here's yet another of my builds for your site.
This is my most recently completed project, which was
my second submission for the Airfix GB over on the
What If board. I call it the A-13 Strike Shrike.

The base kit is the 1/72 Airfix/MPC Stuka. The wings
are from a Williams Bros. Douglas World Cruiser and
the canopy and landing gear were scratchbuilt from
clear plastic sheet. The engine and prop were left
over from the Airfix P-40E and the added cowl guns
were scratched from landing gear struts. The cute
little RDF loop is actually a 1/144 prop ring with a
bit of the sprue left on as a base. The entire model
is hand painted, including the rudder stripes. I used
mostly Polly-Scale paints but the yellow was Liquitex
Artists' Acrylics mixed with gesso as I was too cheap
and lazy to go to the hobby store for a bottle of
paint. This project took me about two and a half weeks
to complete. I hope you enjoy the pics.

Added 21/01/2006

Brian Da Basher gets his name from his kit bashers. I love his imagination here.

First one is a Me-109 biplane!

I'm in the process of taking the venerable 1/72 Airfix Avro 504 and Me-109G6 and
 crosskitting, or mixing up the wings and fuselages from them to make new airplanes. Here's the completed Me-109 portion of the project. Behold! An Me-109 biplane!
 The undercarriage was scratched from sprue and spares.The wheel spats were hand-molded from squadron putty coated with a layer of CA to smooth out imperfections. Rigging is courtesy of my sewing box.The backstory is that after a drunken bacchanal during a visit to his inlaws in Sweden in the summer of 1934, Herman Goering accidentally left unguarded preliminary fuselage design work for the Bf-109. The Swedish Air Force,
 desperate to modernize their fleet siezed on the opportunity. Their original plan was to import Gloster Gladiators from Britain, but after the diplomatic flap caused by
the imfamous "green kippers" incident were denied so had to seek designs from elsewhere. The Swedes still believed in the myth of the manoeverability of the biplane over the monoplane, so built this craft with two wings, the upper being of good size for high-altitude performance. They eventually built enough of these interesting craft to equip two fighter wings and were used in that capacity until replaced with Seversky two-place fighters.

Here's some pics of the beefed-up 1/144 Lockheed Vega I kitbashed from Minicraft's 1/144 Grumman avenger. The decals came from the box-scale (1/80?) Glemcoe Curtiss Condor. The wheel spats were spares from the Glencoe Martin MB-2. The canopy is scratched (took me three attempts) and so is the cute little tailskid. I used blisterpack from batteries to cover the hole on top the fuse between the wing and tail.

Here's the 1/72 Siemens-Schuckert parasol monoplane I bashed from the venerable Revell Nieuport 28. The ailerons and tailfeathers were scratched from plastic card. The landing gear was from the spares box and the "lozenge" is hand-painted.

Here's the 1/72 Saab sesquiplane I bashed from the fuse of a 1/72 Revell DVII and leftover tail from the Eastern Express HP 0/400. The wing gun was scratched and the rudder is leftover from the Toko Snipe. Rigging is courtesy of my sewing box and rudder stripes are hand-painted.