PEACEMAKER
Hobbycraft’s 1/144 B-36 – Recreating the ‘Magnesium Cloud’ By Dean Large
O
kay, so I chickened out…I’d
always wanted to build a B-36 ever since I saw the James Stewart film ‘Strategic Air Command’ as a kid. The sheer size of the thing was overwhelming, and I remember seeing the Monogram 1/72 kit in the model shop window, and lusting endlessly over it, hoping my parents would take the hint. They were wise, re- alised we didn’t live in an air- craft hangar, and re- fused to buy me this plas-
tic behemoth.
Disappointment reigned. As an adult I decided to rec-
tify this scarring omission from my childhood, and get some therapy by building myself a B- 36. Unfortunately, I inherited my parents’ pragmatic attitude, and couldn’t bring myself to build a model I’d never have room to display, so I turned my attention to the Hobbycraft 1/144 version instead. Early researches on the net didn’t look promising – rough surface texture, lack of detail, and poor fit of the trans- parencies all surfaced as nega- tive points. I decided that my affinity for the B-36 was great enough that I could overcome these, and a very long box duly arrived in the post containing the kit.
Oops… I opened the box to discover
that the fuselage was bigger than I’d realised, measuring
once glued in and sanded over it left no visi-
ble trace at all. As for the poor detailing, the only place this was visible was in the wheel wells, as ab-
over 13 inches
long. I began to realise the size that this thing
would have been in 1/72! The
19 inch span top and bottom halves of the wing were in one piece each, and fitted into the top of the fuselage in a sort of saddle arrangement rather like the current Airfix Valiant. Fit looked good, but as I’d been previously warned, the surface texture was a bit rough. That would be no good as the fin- ished article would need to wear a bare metal finish, as that was the only scheme ever used on the B-36. Fortunately, the merest of wipes over with a piece of fine wet and dry pol- ished the surface up nicely, and relieved it of none of the rather deep panel line detail. Dry fitting did reveal that the
transparencies were a pretty abysmal fit, though. When the fuselage halves were placed to- gether the top canopy bubble was too wide for the fuselage, as was the front glazing. This was taken care of by using a shim of thin plastic card around the nose area only, to widen the fuselage to fit the transparen- cies better. Experimentation was the key to getting the thickness of the card right, and
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solutely noth- ing can be seen in the cockpit once the glazing is on. Even so the wheel wells are pretty small, and I decided against detailing them as they really won’t be noticed.
Six turning… Once construction started,
there really wasn’t much to it. The fuselage went together, the wings and stabilisers went on, and then it was a case of deal- ing with the subassemblies. There are six propellers to as- semble, and unfortunately the join on the spinner falls be- tween the moulded in propeller blades, which calls for some delicate filling and sanding to be done. I find that folding wet and dry into narrow strips makes the sanding easier in these situations.
…and four burning. Then a problem raised its
head – I’d assembled the twin jet pods for installation on the outer wings, when I realised that the kit had originally been designed to depict one of the
earlier B-36 models, which didn’t have these. The engine pylon has a tab on it alright, but the wing has no slot to accom- modate it, needing to be cut out before the wing halves are assembled. It would have been nice to have seen some men- tion of this in the instructions, beforehand, I must say... Some delicate measuring and slic- ing was necessary on the already assembled wing to open up the slots for the pylons. Watch out for this.
Wheelie dealies… The undercarriage was tack-
led next, and proved to be pretty uneventful apart from the potential tedium of paint- ing ten wheels and tyres. The undercarriage oleo legs are a pretty positive fit in the wheel wells, which is a reassuring thing in a kit this big. Fortu- nately I’d left off the hatch be- hind the cockpit canopy so that I had plenty of room to install noseweight once everything else was in place. Balancing on the main undercarriage, this thing took three .44 calibre lead balls to ensure it didn’t rotate for takeoff. That poor little nose- wheel strut!
The Mask of Oh-oh… Once the construction was
complete, I turned my attention to painting. This meant masking the four hundred and seventy
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