It should come as no surprise that the first part of the kit to be assembled is the cockpit. This went together quite well. It is pretty completely detailed with pilot, co-pilot, engineer, and navigator stations. The instructions suggest using Dark Gull Grey for the interior and while I think that black was probably the color of choice for aircraft of this era, I went ahead and painted it FS 36231 anyway. Once that was done, the various parts were painted other colors. For instance, the control columns, pilot/copilot seat frames and instrument panel was painted flat black. The pilot/copilot seat cushions were painted orange and the harnesses sail color with silver buckles. The instrument panel decals were put on  and though out of register (the white part needs trimmed), they fit well and reacted well to Champ setting solution.

Turning to the fuselage halves, the various windows were cemented in place. Then the nose gear was glued into the nose wheel well. This is supposed to be painted silver prior to installation, but since the whole plane is basically silver, I glued this assembly into the right fuselage half without painting it. It'll get painted when the rest of the kit is painted!

The next piece installed is the cockpit itself. The instructions show a lot of weight is needed. I began by putting in some big fishing weights. Then I taped together the fuselage, wings, tailplanes and rudder. These are the main components. I needed more weight. A LOT more weight. After stuffing what seemed like 10 pounds of weight in the nose, that whole mess was smothered in superglue and left to dry. It should be enough (I hope).

While awaiting the weights to dry, I assembled the fin, tailplanes, wings, wing tanks, wheels and flaps. When those were dry, they were cleaned up. Everything needs some filler. It is a requirement of my kits that they do so! These components needed very little, mostly where they were cut from the sprues with my handy Xuron cutters.

Next step was to cement the fuselage halves together. First, I placed the wing spars in one fuselage half and threaded them through the appropriate slots in the other half. I didn't glue them, because I though I may need to adjust them when putting on the wings. It turns out I didn't have to so you may want to glue them in place. Gluing the fuselage isn't that simple as it is a long one and relatively devoid of internal bracing other than the wing spars and cockpit. Take your time and you'll have no trouble. I also glued the fin on at this time. Fit is very good except at the very front of the fin. Once dry, the filler came out to take care of some sink marks (mostly on the bottom) and the fit problem at the front part of the fin (several applications needed).

My attention turned to the flaps. They are not designed to be displayed in the lowered position. They also don't fit the back of the wing worth a hoot. In fact, the fit is really bad. Why these were not molded as part of the wing itself is beyond me as it required a lot of filler and fussing to get smoothed out. These flaps are part of the trailing edge of the wing. When lowered a small section of the rear of the wing goes with the flap. This is the only place they fit. The leading edge of the underside of the flap in many places doesn't touch the trailing edge of the underside of the wing. Filling this gap is useless as the first flex will break the filler. You can either leave it alone and accept the gap or fill it with sprue. I chose to leave it alone.

While the filler was drying, the tailplanes were glued in place. The fit is perfect. No gaps, no filler, just a light swipe of sandpaper to remove any glue marks. They are keyed so it is impossible to get them in the wrong side. Next, the engine nacelles. The main body of them are a three piece assembly with a single upper piece and the lower section in two pieces. These are designed for left and right sides. Even though they won't properly fit in the wrong place, I etched a small 'L' in the left wing pieces on the inside where they won't show when glued on. I did the same with the wing tanks which are also handed.

The nacelles are not an easy glue. Getting the two lower halves glued together is no problem, but the join area for the upper piece is small. You also need to glue on the upper piece before the lower ones dry in order to make sure that they will properly fit. Allowing the lower part to dry first may make them too narrow for the upper section. Better to be safe than sorry. Fit of the lower pieces is very good, but the upper one isn't that great as it doesn't line up perfectly. Just make sure the front  of the parts are aligned and you'll have no problems. When the glue had dried, the joins were sanded smooth and any filler needed applied. They all needed a little bit.

Meanwhile, back at the fuselage. All the filling was done, though there was still no boom operators area or cockpit glass installed just in case I needed to add more weight!! At this time, I masked off the small windows. Once the wings are on, it will be difficult to get to them.  I them glued the outer engine nacelle to the two wings. The fit was quite good and no filler was needed. The instructions have you attach the wings and then later attach the nacelles. I thought I may have to use filler on the nacelles so cut my losses by doing the outboard ones first. This way, I could still get to the wing/fuselage join if filler was needed there. 

I then bravely glued the left wing onto the fuselage. The fit is quite good and no filler was needed. Good thing too, as the 'double bubble' design of the fuselage would have made it very difficult to get into the area with sandpaper! I then thought twice about adding the right wing until I saw how well the inner nacelle fit on the left one.

Speaking of nacelles (nice segue, eh?), it was time to glue the engine cowlings on. But first, they had to be painted aluminum on the inside. Once that was done, the engines, which had been painted black and then drybrushed, were glued in place. An interesting defect was noticed while doing this. Not sure if they really look this way or not, but it seems as if each engine had 8 cylinders per row!  There was an additional cylinder siamesed onto one of the lower ones. As you can see in the image, I painted that 'extra' one black and hoped that no one would notice. Very odd indeed and not something that was on the original B-50 kit. Maybe someone can enlighten us on this. Once the engine fronts were glued in and dry the cowling section was glued onto the nacelle front. These basically are glued on the very bottom only to keep the open 'cowl flap' look. Fit was ok, meaning I needed filler.

Meanwhile, back at the fuselage, the clear boom operator's position had the windows masked and it was glued onto the fuselage. The fit was very good, though I did put filler around the edges to ensure that any gaps not visible because of the clear plastic, were properly filled. That filler was eventually sanded down. Then I went to the front of the kit and installed the canopy section. This didn't fit as well as the previous piece, but still didn't fit too poorly. It ended up being a touch too wide at the sides and not tall enough in the center. This was despite it being clamped to try to eliminate some of the overhang. A couple of rounds of filler took care of it though. 

Then the boom was carefully test fit and the boom receptacle on the lower fuselage was glued in place. Next the other wing was glued in place. This one didn't fit as well as the previous one giving me a few gaps that needed filling. Once the wings were firmly in place, the additional engine nacelles were glued on. If you learn nothing else from this review you should learn that (a) the wings should be glued on without the nacelles to ease any filler repairs that need done and (b) the engine nacelles need to be completely built sans prop before gluing on the wings. It just makes doing the filler work that much easier. I also glued on the radome at this time. I had forgotten about it and also forgot to drill out the mounting holes for it when I glued the fuselage halves together. DOH! Fortunately, it isn't a big deal and glues on quite well without the mounting holes.

The next step was to glue on the main landing gear. One needs to take care to be sure that all the bits and pieces are glued on straight. There is a front piece that gave me some trouble as there is no real positive glue spot for it. Take your time and you should have no problems. Once the gear was solid and dry, it was off to the paint shop.

The first thing you realize when starting to paint a kit of this size is that it is going to take a LOT of paint. In fact, I fully plan on it going through most of a full bottle. The first step for me was to give the aircraft a full, but light coat of gloss white. This is for two reasons. The first is that there are lots of areas of gloss red to go on and it needs a white undercoat. Secondly, I'll be using a Metallizer for the rest of the aircraft and it requires a smooth surface as well. The gloss paint will also fill in a number of small scratches and imperfections that just jump out at you when using metallics.

I used Testors Model Master paints for all the exterior colors on this kit. Before applying any of the outside colors, the transparencies were sprayed with the interior color. Then the gloss white. It took a number of sessions to get this color on. The first parts I sprayed white were the tail and wing tips. That way, I could get the Insignia Red painted onto those areas. Once the red parts were painted and dry, they were masked off to prevent any overspray from contaminating them. Then the kit was resprayed with gloss white after the red areas were masked off. I put a rather heavy coat on the area above the cockpit and when it was dry, it was masked off.

Then the engines were plugged with tissue and the entire aircraft was painted with Testors Aluminum Metallizer. All of this painting and masking took the better part of 3 weeks to do. When doing large aircraft, one needs to allot much time for not only construction, but for painting as well!

While I was painting the aircraft, I was informed that I'd be getting the latest Airways Graphics decal sheet for the C/KC-97. Because of that, I stopped paint work on the airframe and concentrated on the smaller bits like wheels, gear doors and the like. One rather disappointing discovery was that there are two very large ejector pin holes on the outer side of the nose wheels. In addition, the wheels look to be too skinny for the KC-97. I looked at a True Details aftermarket set, but those didn't appear to be much better so I filled in the holes and carried on.

At this time, the main gear doors were added to the landing gear. I discovered that I had forgotten to glue on the smaller doors behind the main gear when I installed the main gear. Getting them to fit after the fact was just impossible, even after removing the mounting lugs. My only choice was to cut the part of the door that fits down behind the strut and glue the upper section. It isn't very neat, but it did work. The main gear doors had to be glued with superglue as the retraction strut wants to push the doors away from the gear well!

I then repainted the gear area and the rest of the airframe where I had missed some spots with the Metallizer on the first pass. When that was completely dry, I removed the masking from the Arctic Red marks. Then I sprayed the airframe with Future clear acrylic. This dulled the paint to make it look like aluminum paint and not bare metal. It also glossed up the flat Arctic Red parts so that decals could be applied.

It was at this time that I received the long awaited C/HC/KC-97 sheet from Airway Graphics. There is a KC-97G on it and so that is the scheme I will use. I looked at the decal placement guide. Hey, this one doesn't have a white roof. What's all that black stuff on it. Lookee here, the hinges on the control surfaces are painted red while mine aren't. The wings on the flying boom are black. This wasn't on the Academy painting guide!

I could see that I would have to do a bit of repainting. So it was 'mask-o-rama' for a while and then back to the paint shop to take care of the differences. Yes, it was a bit of extra work, but the decals are really worth it. Most of the additions were painting various areas matte black as well as some more aluminum paint on areas I had painted too thinly.

Once the kit was finally painted (and I'm sure I'll find glitches) it was time for the decals. I made a conscious decision to use mostly the kit decals and just use the specific decals from the Airway Graphics sheet. The reason is that I am planning to build another one of these kits and I wanted to do that one right from the beginning, making all the suggested changes that were not done with this kit.

The kit decals actually are quite nice, though not up to the standards of the AG sheet. For instance, the SAC band is not only too light a blue and too wide, but there is no way in the world it will ever fit. It needs to have a double curve in it to conform to the fuselage! Other problems with the kit decals are the wing insignia are too large (I used them anyway), the leading edge antenna (the black decals) are too large in all dimensions, and I'm not sure if the underfuselage red stripe is supposed to be used at all!

Decaling an aircraft of this size, even with the minimal ones given, took the better part of a week. The wing walk decals themselves were a long and laborious process to put on. One small glitch with the AG decals. They give you some silver rectangles to use as background for the tail number on red tailed aircraft. The two examples given were too small for the serial on the KC-97G. I had to make those from Bare Metal Foil. The result is quite pleasing and only took a few minutes to make.

Once the decals were on the plane was resprayed with a clear gloss to seal them in. Then I went to work on the props. They had already been painted silver, so I started applying the yellow tip decals. These are actually smaller than the prop tips, so I had to paint them on. Then I tried hand painting the black areas. Man, what a mess. In fact, I got so frustrated that I let the kit sit for a few days while I moped about it. The only thing to do was to start over again. I gave each prop a liberal coating of Strip-a-Kit to remove the paint. It actually took two to remove it all. Then each prop was sprayed gloss light grey. Then aluminum Metallizer. The undercoat gives the Metallizer something to 'bite' into so that you can mask it without removing the paint. The tips were masked and painted yellow. Then the prop was masked so that I could paint the black areas.

As the kit now had the decals sealed, I took the masking off the transparencies and the underfuselage lights. These came off very easily and left very little residue. What was there was quickly removed with another piece of tape. Then the tip lights were installed as were the underwing tanks. I used white glue for the tanks to keep any superglue from reacting with the decals. The astrodome was glued in place with non-fogging superglue.

Next the engine intakes were blackened using a Rapidograph pen. Then the fuselage antennas were glued on. There are two on the top and four on the bottom. Naturally I knocked off a few of them and had to reglue them. The lower ADF sense antennas were made from stretched sprue. Finally, the props were glued on using white glue and the kit was photographed before I broke off anything else!

It certainly ranks right up there as one of the biggest kits I have built. It really is impressive and is sure to draw comments, though not many people at my club said anything about it when I brought it in. I can only assume that they are illiterate hillbillies that don't know greatness and effort when they see it! :o)

Despite the size of the beast and the time it took to build, I definitely plan on doing another one here in the future. Because it is such a huge beast , I cannot recommend it to beginners and those with small work tables!!

Late Note. Thanks to all who reminded me that the elevators should have been painted aluminum!

August 2000

Review copy courtesy of me and my wallet! 

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