Jessie_C

So what do you get inside the box of a Trumpeter Liberty Ship? Let's take a look: Upper and lower hull The rest of the upper decks Deck houses and hatch covers And lastly, 2 identical sprues of tiny fiddly bits

Let's be fair here. Mine is about 30 cm long stem to stern, and the hull is 4 pieces including the screw and rudder. It most sincerely can't be compared to the masterpiece you're doing out of card of all things!

Since this is the bomber you could open up a representation of the hatch in the floor just in front of the Navigator's seat. It was rectangular with rounded edges. Outside: Inside (The image won't embed, so I have to link instead.) It comes from this very nice page.

So there it is. Boring grey merchant ships seem to be the hot property here in this group build. But I've fooled you all! My Liberty Ship is going to appear as a generic post-war merchant ship, so it won't be boring and grey I'm aiming for something similar to this:

The other solution is to cut a piece of sprue just long enough to force out the sides of the fuselage and glue it in just in front of the cockpit. It's fairly clear that Airfix has positioned this kit at the junior modeller end of the market, and they figure that kids and their parents won't care about the lack of detail and that those of us who do, know about aftermarket. Airfix exists to make money, and parents/grandparents will buy thee kits for the kiddies.

E boats are S boats. What you called them depended upon which side you were on.

It makes you wonder whether the people who write the instructions have ever built a model in their lives.

Private apology has been sent, public apology follows: Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. My offending post has been edited to remove the offensive drift.

For anyone worried about the NotCalypso, I've got a set of proper Calypso decals from Evil-bay which I'll use to make it correctly.

I have a few choices. I will entertain votes for which one I ought to build until the end of the weekend, then I'll get started. The thread title will change once the desired victim subject is chosen. And the votes are in: NotCalypso 0 Liberty Ship 5 I-400 2 Cutty Sark 2 Schwimmwagen 0 Also, just for Richard, because I know he gets anxious about this kind of thing. Just a little bit past the required 'no more than 25% started' rule. The only aftermarket I'm using are the decals and the Falcon canopy, nose and wingtip light

And here I was looking all over the place for the blatantly obvious shape error and wondering why I couldn't find it.

The specified colour was Khaki, but that varied per dye lot, material the uniform was made from, age and the quality of the light it was seen in. It was a kind of brownish/greenish colour. Tamiya XF-49 Khaki is a good starting point. Then add a drop or 2 of white, black or green to vary it a bit.

Oh yes, that looks much better now. Did you lost a starboard wing tank fin? I really ought to dig mine out of storage and finish it. It's much too far along to include in this group build, but it's been sitting incomplete for years. Some day it'll look something like this because my Dad flew in them:

The really nifty thing about these is the system to warn up the engine. Since they didn't want to sit on the surface and be attackable while the liquid-cooled engine warned up to operating temperature, they had a connection in the hangar to the submarine's oil system and they pumped hot oil into the engines of the 2 or 3 Seirans (depending which submarine they were in. The I-14s had 2; the I-400s had 3) for about half an hour before surfacing. Then they could run the aircraft out onto the catapult, unfold the wings and tail, and woosh it off into the sky in minutes. I'm pretty certain that th