Academy 1/72 Boeing B-29A "Superfortress"

www.bowemodels.com

It's not exactly an unusual modelling subject, however my customer was after a very specific aircraft for which no third party markings were available. To make matters worse, reference material for this aircraft was very limited.

The aircraft concerned was "Green Hornet", a B-29A as based in Guam in 1945. The only photographs to be found of this machine were not exactly comprehensive, indeed pretty much everything available is contained in a single web page here. But I like a challenge, and so armed with this kit, some Eduard etch, the Metallic Details engine car set, ModelShock resin engines, resin wheels and some lovely brass gun barrels from Master, I set forth.

The main build part of this project was pretty routine and I shall not bother you with it, however I shall mention the excellent Metallic Details engine car set. The set is good, the instructions are not. A bit of guesswork is required in areas. Also, the exhaust sections, whilst gorgeous thinks to behold, do require some major surgery to the kit parts in order to fit. You basically have to chop up the kit nacelles and put them back together around the MD parts. This involves much test fitting, filling and cursing but I got there in the end.

The MD set also contains resin engines but I discarded these in favour of the ModelShock offerings which a much better, especially with the simple addition of some push rods made from fine steel wire. I say simple, it took a couple of hours...

Once the main build and initial metallic finishing was done, we move on to the markings. I decided that the big orange "O" on the tail was best painted on and so this was done with some careful masking. The hardest markings element was the "Green Hornet" nose art itself. The only reference I had was the rather grainy black and white photo on the web page. Agreeing with the customer that some artistic guesswork and talent was going to be required, I cracked out my digital paintbrushes.

I traced the artwork into a wire frame black line picture with a steady hand and mouse, stretched it a little to compensate for the photo angle and then filled in the colours as best I could guess. My working assumption was that the "Green Hornet" would be predominantly green and I challenge anyone to argue that, so this is what I came up with.

The 314th bomb wing "globe" logo for the other side of the cockpit was a little easier, however every aircraft seems to have carried a slightly different version of it so I did my best based on the hues in the black and white photos.

Other markings are minimal and standard so these came from either the kit or my spares drawer. Otherwise everything was finished in my usual manner and I did deliberately make this one a little tatty to coincide with the available photos.

There is something rather pleasing about ending up with a unique model, I am pretty sure this particular aircraft has never been modelled before (if you know differently, please keep it to yourself for now) so please enjoy the end result as I have.

You can find the full progress photo album here.