"Good Things Come In Small Packages"...Number Two

Just trying to "Keep It Real!"

Well, I searched all my files because I know I have seen this bottom pic somewhere in my Thunderbolt file. Seems I managed to make a mess of that file, but to all those aviation art freaks, you know which photo I speak of. The photo of the real "Bolt" is a "N" version and had five inch wing rockets attached.

Anyway, my son was only about ten or eleven when we built this silver "D" model, but I didn't photograph them till many years later. In the background, you see Brian's own "D" model, which he pretty much made himself. I thought he did a pretty good job on his especially after he witnessed my finished Thunderbolt. "The Turtle" was the first plane I introduced the airbrush and all it's capabilities to Brian. He got pretty good at airbrushing D-Day stripes on planes. He really seemed to enjoy that aspect of model making. He was perfectly willing to brush them on every plane he built including the German ones.

We were gonna make six versions of the WWII bird, Robert Johnson's, Hub Zemke's, Bud Mahurin's, Gabby Gabreski's, Glenn Eagleston's and a few other planes and pilots who's names escape me. We did purchase four more 1/48 scale models, investigated the many different paint schemes and appropriate decals to each aircraft, but, in time, I realized it might have been a little too ambitious for a twelve or thirteen year old kid and as the years went by, his enthusiasm diminished.

Of course, what's old again can easily become new. Those models, and a dozen others, are packed away carefully and stored in the attic... for just such an occasion.

Copyright 2011/Ben Bensen III