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ET2SN · 02-09-21, 11:13 AM

So, I've gotten some work done on the basic build.

I'm still in the middle of planning what this thing is going to look like while staring at the box that contains my other B-52H and wondering if that kit is going to get built or donate some parts to this kit.

The other kit is a 1990 era Revell B-52H with a full load of AGM-86 ALCMs under the wings and the distinctive Sea Eagle/Sea Hawk tail art from the 92nd BW at Fairchild AFB. The plan was to build the old kit basically box-stock with the Fairchild tail art and the older "Euro two" camo pattern of gunship gray with patches of "NATO green" on the upper surfaces and sides with lighter gray "tiger stripes" under the wings and fuse. I've been keeping an eye out for another version of this Revell kit from the same time period. A "modern" (1990's) B-52G that included a full load of Harpoon missiles under the wings. While all or at least most of the B-52 crews practiced shooting Harpoons at ships, only a handful of bomb wings actually got the missiles to load on the plane. The 92nd BW inherited this mission from the 93rd BW at Castle AFB in the late 1980's, so its possible to load them onto a B-52H.

Anyway, the one problem of having BOTH the Revell and GWH kits happens when you hold one fuse next to the other. They ain't the same.

I always thought Revell got the shape right, or at least the most right but the GWH kit is just better.

Where the GWH kit stumbles a bit is the external antennas, wing vortex generators, and some fuselage stiffeners that were added to the outside of the fuse. The stiffeners are easy to create using strips of thin styrene sheet and some sanding once they are glued in place. The antennas and vortex generators are not so easy and its very tempting to start cutting parts out of the old Revell kit.

But, I'm resisting that temptation.

I still want to complete the Revell model as a "retro build" from 1990 in period-correct colors, lettering, and load-out with some resin wheels and underwing pylons. The GWH kit has some more possibilities and I'm still hoping to start seeing resin and photo etch become available. As far as decals, at the moment it ain't so good. I'm very sure at this point I will build the GWH kit as a modern B-52H from Minot AFB, 23rd BS*. The kit decals include a "boss bird" from Minot's 69th BS (yellow tail stripe) but "boss birds" are boring to me. So, I ordered the one decal set available in north America from Caracal decals to get the red and gold "Bomber Barons" tail stripe and the BW and BS logos. It should be noted that Caracal has a new B-52 decal set "in the pipeline" and that Cartograph does their printing in Italy. I'm hoping the new set includes wing and fuse walkways in dark gray instead of black.

At this point I should also point out that I'm really into Flight Sim (FS2002 and FS2004 to be precise) and I've racked up a lot of time in the old Alphasim B-52 G and H models.

If you dig around at Flightsim.com, you'll find some B-52 repaints that I posted which includes a B-52H named "Minot Betty" from the 23rd BS. The "Betty" nose art is fictional, its basically Betty Boop in a short red dress with some fancy script work that I came up with when it felt like the Air Force was naming anything with at least two tires "The Memphis Belle".

The other nose art I was playing with for that plane came from a WWII B-17G named "American Beauty" which featured a (tasteful) naked blonde laying in a bed of roses. Ironically, I borrowed the artwork from Caracal's web site which was why "Betty" showed up on the version I uploaded. So, I knew Caracal did the "American Beauty" nose art in 1/48th scale, what about 1/144th scale- could I get that lucky?

Well yes, yes I could.

Kits World did print the decal sheet in 1/144th scale. A while ago.. In the UK...

After a couple of days of beating up the WWW, I tracked down a sheet on EBay in the UK and its on its way to Iowa.

Whether I can get the nose art from a B-17 to fit on a B-52 and "look right" is one of those bridges I'll cross when its time.

Meanwhile, there's more than planning going on with the GWH kit. I mentioned that I'll toss out some hints on building and painting at this scale and I also mentioned this kit doesn't include lights. So, here's how you add stuff like landing and nav lights:

All you need is a pin vice, clear paint, clear red, clear green, and clear blue (preferably Tamiya's acrylics) and some "clear parts" PVA glue. You'll also need a bright shade of silver paint or a Molotow chrome silver pen (the smaller the tip the better).

In the case of the GWH kit, you'll need to find the locations of the lights and mark them in pencil. Then, drill a small hole into the plastic. Not too deep, just deep enough so it looks right. For older nav lights that look like a teardrop, start the hole like normal then rotate the bit 45 degrees towards the front of the wing so the hole looks more like an oval. Clean up the inside of the hole using glue or even surfacing primer, what's important is getting the hole just deep enough so it looks like it belongs there while still having a definite rim. Next, paint the inside in either chrome or a very bright silver and allow to dry fully.
Depending on how much you want the light "lens" to poke out of the fuse, use the PVA/clear parts glue to build up the face of the "lens". Allow some room for the clear paint. This isn't anything like painting, just drop or blot the clear into place and let it set. You want the surface to form almost a bubble shape. Finish with the clear paint. I like to use Tamiya's clears because they dry so hard, I also don't thin these paints like I would with normal Tamiya acrylics, you want them thick so they can be applied with a toothpick or even a pin. This is usually a lengthy process, expect the glue and clear paints to shrink as they cure. If the colored paints start to look too dark, switch to adding layers of just the clear. This little trick works nicely once you're comfortable doing it. You can do the drilling during the early parts of the build and save the painting for when the kit is almost finished or an assembly is complete.

I mentioned a while ago that the B-52 has two red beacon lights on its back. You can add them easily using this technique. On the GWH model, locate the "mushroom/saucer" shaped antenna on the rear top of the fuse. Its about 1.5 cm from the leading edge of the vert tail. Staying square to the fuse, measure down the side .5 cm and mark the spot. Do the same for the other side of the fuse. When you're done you should have two marks 1 cm apart when looking directly down at the fuse halves with the "mushroom" antenna in the middle. Drill the holes ( I use a "65" / .035 drill bit ) square to the curve of the fuse. These holes are small, but they will "pop" just enough when the kit is complete and painted.

Paint the hole with bright silver and allow to fully dry, then start filling in with clear red. Build up the "lens" so its defiantly sticking out of the fuse, on the real plane these lights are round and about three inches tall so you want a small but definite "blob" on the fuse.

You can also use a variation of this trick on the Sniper Pod. GWH says to paint the window blue, but I want to do some research and create a more 3D solution.

Otherwise, I have some paint on order. The GWH kit includes a bunch of AGM-129 cruise missiles and, well, Google it. The -129 is painted an odd color. It defiantly NOT Olive Drab and it isn't black but its darker than Gunship Gray.

I wound up ordering some Tamiya "German Gray" which is fairly dark but also has some hints of blue in it. We'll see what arrives..

*- Bonus material: I mention the 23rd and 69th BS's at Minot and they have an odd history. The 23rd BS dates back to 1917 and its unit shield shows five bombs dropping into a volcano, which really happened in Hawai'i back in the 1920's. The idea was to divert a lava flow that threatened a town. After that, the 23rd BS went on to become a B-17 and B-24 squadron in the Pacific during WWII and eventually wound up at Travis AFB flying the B-36 and later the B-52D.
The 23rd transferred to Minot AFB in 1968 to fly the B-52G and has stayed there ever since. Then, 2008 happened..

The 23rd BS, or The Barons or The Bomber Barons sent one of their B-52H's down to Barksdale AFB with a full load of cruise missile "shapes" loaded on the pylons under the wings. The shapes are used to train ground crews in handling cruise missiles and the flight crews in getting used to the additional weight and drag without having to haul nukes around the country. They are identical to real cruise missiles but are completely inert and un-armed. There was just one problem, what was bolted to the pylons of the plane that landed at Barksdale weren't dummies but instead were the Real McCoy. Not armed but ready to launch with a nuke payload.

This was about as bad it gets for losing control of 100 Kiloton warheads. In the complicated chain of control and delivery, NO one spotted an error until the plane had flown from North Dakota to Louisiana.

The Air Force immediately put the 5th BW (which also includes a lot of missile silos in North Dakota) "on ice", grounding the bombers while installing "watchdogs" for the missile crews. This is standard Air Force business when chains of nuclear custody fail and heads are about to roll, except this was also Minot which carried more than its fair share of the US Nuclear Triad.
While the Navy had its Trident bases and Ohio class boomers, the Air Force has the missile wings and the B-52s. By 2008, the B-52s were based at either Barksdale or Minot. Barksdale is located just down the road from Bossier City, La. There are restaurants and bars and movie theaters and the weather is nice. Barksdale by this time had also become the prime B-52 base in the Air Force where some of the squadrons became specialized at dropping conventional bombs on military targets. Which became very important for an officer who wanted to get promoted up the ladder. The nuclear mission was as important as it always was (Well, mostly. The Triad was mostly running in Idle, Putin was fairly quiet and China had other things going on.) and it was the only mission at Minot, but it was also becoming a dead end to a career. Minot also had, well, not much really. There were two seasons (Winter and July), a lot of wind all the time, and no where to go unless you craved to travel from the prairie to the Canadian prairie, which looked pretty much the same.

After a couple of weeks of harrumphing, the Air Force still had a problem. The 23rd BS had been grounded pending a grueling inquiry and re-certification process but the 23rd BS was a key part of the 5th BW's mission.
The answer was to re-install the old 69th BS (which had formerly been located near my old stomping grounds at Loring AFB in Maine) using the same aircraft and crews (who survived the inquiry part) plus some planes that were transferred from Barksdale and paint the tops of the tails yellow and black.

02-09-21, 11:13 AM	#6
ET2SN ET2/SS Join Date: Oct 2017 Posts: 2,515 Downloads: 58 Uploads: 0	So, I've gotten some work done on the basic build. I'm still in the middle of planning what this thing is going to look like while staring at the box that contains my other B-52H and wondering if that kit is going to get built or donate some parts to this kit. The other kit is a 1990 era Revell B-52H with a full load of AGM-86 ALCMs under the wings and the distinctive Sea Eagle/Sea Hawk tail art from the 92nd BW at Fairchild AFB. The plan was to build the old kit basically box-stock with the Fairchild tail art and the older "Euro two" camo pattern of gunship gray with patches of "NATO green" on the upper surfaces and sides with lighter gray "tiger stripes" under the wings and fuse. I've been keeping an eye out for another version of this Revell kit from the same time period. A "modern" (1990's) B-52G that included a full load of Harpoon missiles under the wings. While all or at least most of the B-52 crews practiced shooting Harpoons at ships, only a handful of bomb wings actually got the missiles to load on the plane. The 92nd BW inherited this mission from the 93rd BW at Castle AFB in the late 1980's, so its possible to load them onto a B-52H. Anyway, the one problem of having BOTH the Revell and GWH kits happens when you hold one fuse next to the other. They ain't the same. I always thought Revell got the shape right, or at least the most right but the GWH kit is just better. Where the GWH kit stumbles a bit is the external antennas, wing vortex generators, and some fuselage stiffeners that were added to the outside of the fuse. The stiffeners are easy to create using strips of thin styrene sheet and some sanding once they are glued in place. The antennas and vortex generators are not so easy and its very tempting to start cutting parts out of the old Revell kit. But, I'm resisting that temptation. I still want to complete the Revell model as a "retro build" from 1990 in period-correct colors, lettering, and load-out with some resin wheels and underwing pylons. The GWH kit has some more possibilities and I'm still hoping to start seeing resin and photo etch become available. As far as decals, at the moment it ain't so good. I'm very sure at this point I will build the GWH kit as a modern B-52H from Minot AFB, 23rd BS. The kit decals include a "boss bird" from Minot's 69th BS (yellow tail stripe) but "boss birds" are boring to me. So, I ordered the one decal set available in north America from Caracal decals to get the red and gold "Bomber Barons" tail stripe and the BW and BS logos. It should be noted that Caracal has a new B-52 decal set "in the pipeline" and that Cartograph does their printing in Italy. I'm hoping the new set includes wing and fuse walkways in dark gray instead of black. At this point I should also point out that I'm really into Flight Sim (FS2002 and FS2004 to be precise) and I've racked up a lot of time in the old Alphasim B-52 G and H models. If you dig around at Flightsim.com, you'll find some B-52 repaints that I posted which includes a B-52H named "Minot Betty" from the 23rd BS. The "Betty" nose art is fictional, its basically Betty Boop in a short red dress with some fancy script work that I came up with when it felt like the Air Force was naming anything with at least two tires "The Memphis Belle". The other nose art I was playing with for that plane came from a WWII B-17G named "American Beauty" which featured a (tasteful) naked blonde laying in a bed of roses. Ironically, I borrowed the artwork from Caracal's web site which was why "Betty" showed up on the version I uploaded. So, I knew Caracal did the "American Beauty" nose art in 1/48th scale, what about 1/144th scale- could I get that lucky? Well yes, yes I could. Kits World did print the decal sheet in 1/144th scale. A while ago.. In the UK... After a couple of days of beating up the WWW, I tracked down a sheet on EBay in the UK and its on its way to Iowa. Whether I can get the nose art from a B-17 to fit on a B-52 and "look right" is one of those bridges I'll cross when its time. Meanwhile, there's more than planning going on with the GWH kit. I mentioned that I'll toss out some hints on building and painting at this scale and I also mentioned this kit doesn't include lights. So, here's how you add stuff like landing and nav lights: All you need is a pin vice, clear paint, clear red, clear green, and clear blue (preferably Tamiya's acrylics) and some "clear parts" PVA glue. You'll also need a bright shade of silver paint or a Molotow chrome silver pen (the smaller the tip the better). In the case of the GWH kit, you'll need to find the locations of the lights and mark them in pencil. Then, drill a small hole into the plastic. Not too deep, just deep enough so it looks right. For older nav lights that look like a teardrop, start the hole like normal then rotate the bit 45 degrees towards the front of the wing so the hole looks more like an oval. Clean up the inside of the hole using glue or even surfacing primer, what's important is getting the hole just deep enough so it looks like it belongs there while still having a definite rim. Next, paint the inside in either chrome or a very bright silver and allow to dry fully. Depending on how much you want the light "lens" to poke out of the fuse, use the PVA/clear parts glue to build up the face of the "lens". Allow some room for the clear paint. This isn't anything like painting, just drop or blot the clear into place and let it set. You want the surface to form almost a bubble shape. Finish with the clear paint. I like to use Tamiya's clears because they dry so hard, I also don't thin these paints like I would with normal Tamiya acrylics, you want them thick so they can be applied with a toothpick or even a pin. This is usually a lengthy process, expect the glue and clear paints to shrink as they cure. If the colored paints start to look too dark, switch to adding layers of just the clear. This little trick works nicely once you're comfortable doing it. You can do the drilling during the early parts of the build and save the painting for when the kit is almost finished or an assembly is complete. I mentioned a while ago that the B-52 has two red beacon lights on its back. You can add them easily using this technique. On the GWH model, locate the "mushroom/saucer" shaped antenna on the rear top of the fuse. Its about 1.5 cm from the leading edge of the vert tail. Staying square to the fuse, measure down the side .5 cm and mark the spot. Do the same for the other side of the fuse. When you're done you should have two marks 1 cm apart when looking directly down at the fuse halves with the "mushroom" antenna in the middle. Drill the holes ( I use a "65" / .035 drill bit ) square to the curve of the fuse. These holes are small, but they will "pop" just enough when the kit is complete and painted. Paint the hole with bright silver and allow to fully dry, then start filling in with clear red. Build up the "lens" so its defiantly sticking out of the fuse, on the real plane these lights are round and about three inches tall so you want a small but definite "blob" on the fuse. You can also use a variation of this trick on the Sniper Pod. GWH says to paint the window blue, but I want to do some research and create a more 3D solution. Otherwise, I have some paint on order. The GWH kit includes a bunch of AGM-129 cruise missiles and, well, Google it. The -129 is painted an odd color. It defiantly NOT Olive Drab and it isn't black but its darker than Gunship Gray. I wound up ordering some Tamiya "German Gray" which is fairly dark but also has some hints of blue in it. We'll see what arrives.. - Bonus material: I mention the 23rd and 69th BS's at Minot and they have an odd history. The 23rd BS dates back to 1917 and its unit shield shows five bombs dropping into a volcano, which really happened in Hawai'i back in the 1920's. The idea was to divert a lava flow that threatened a town. After that, the 23rd BS went on to become a B-17 and B-24 squadron in the Pacific during WWII and eventually wound up at Travis AFB flying the B-36 and later the B-52D. The 23rd transferred to Minot AFB in 1968 to fly the B-52G and has stayed there ever since. Then, 2008 happened.. The 23rd BS, or The Barons or The Bomber Barons sent one of their B-52H's down to Barksdale AFB with a full load of cruise missile "shapes" loaded on the pylons under the wings. The shapes are used to train ground crews in handling cruise missiles and the flight crews in getting used to the additional weight and drag without having to haul nukes around the country. They are identical to real cruise missiles but are completely inert and un-armed. There was just one problem, what was bolted to the pylons of the plane that landed at Barksdale weren't dummies but instead were the Real McCoy. Not armed but ready to launch with a nuke payload. This was about as bad it gets for losing control of 100 Kiloton warheads. In the complicated chain of control and delivery, NO one spotted an error until the plane had flown from North Dakota to Louisiana. The Air Force immediately put the 5th BW (which also includes a lot of missile silos in North Dakota) "on ice", grounding the bombers while installing "watchdogs" for the missile crews. This is standard Air Force business when chains of nuclear custody fail and heads are about to roll, except this was also Minot which carried more than its fair share of the US Nuclear Triad. While the Navy had its Trident bases and Ohio class boomers, the Air Force has the missile wings and the B-52s. By 2008, the B-52s were based at either Barksdale or Minot. Barksdale is located just down the road from Bossier City, La. There are restaurants and bars and movie theaters and the weather is nice. Barksdale by this time had also become the prime B-52 base in the Air Force where some of the squadrons became specialized at dropping conventional bombs on military targets. Which became very important for an officer who wanted to get promoted up the ladder. The nuclear mission was as important as it always was (Well, mostly. The Triad was mostly running in Idle, Putin was fairly quiet and China had other things going on.) and it was the only mission at Minot, but it was also becoming a dead end to a career. Minot also had, well, not much really. There were two seasons (Winter and July), a lot of wind all the time, and no where to go unless you craved to travel from the prairie to the Canadian prairie, which looked pretty much the same. After a couple of weeks of harrumphing, the Air Force still had a problem. The 23rd BS had been grounded pending a grueling inquiry and re-certification process but the 23rd BS was a key part of the 5th BW's mission. The answer was to re-install the old 69th BS (which had formerly been located near my old stomping grounds at Loring AFB in Maine) using the same aircraft and crews (who survived the inquiry part) plus some planes that were transferred from Barksdale and paint the tops of the tails yellow and black.