Hi Peter. This is another one of those kits I had as a kid, would have been mid 70s. I remember the colour. Thwe wings used to flap around on it when I used to 'fly ' it around my bedroom. It is a chunky kit. The picture is what made me buy it, that flame from the exhaust just hooked me. The real thing wasn,t so successful. It was a bit wayward which is why it had such a large rudder. Its short fuselage length just made things worse. If you,ve ever watched video's showing them landing they did come down with a crunch. Massive engine, massive airframe. I wish that Matchbox had made the rear gunners window in two parts so that you could have it open. I never really done a good job on the interior painting on my aircraft, that came later. I did the Yorktown version I think but I didn,t do a great job with the two tone blue scheme. The two blues just didn,t match. One ( the dark one ) was a bit shiny and the light one was very flat, Humbrol paints for you. Anyway good memories just the same. Thanks Peter. 10 out of 10.
My nan bought me this exact same model for my 8th birthday. I loved building it. So much so it stayed with me. I recently sourced one on ebay will build it in memory of my nan.
I just noticed that Roy Huxley painted a post war British carrier on the boxtop artwork, visible at 1:13. Looks like HMS Ark Royal or HMS Victorious, it has an angled deck and typical British carrier superstructure, funnel and radar. Maybe he didn't had a Japanese carrier reference photo, or it's some kind of easteregg fun from him, who knows :-)
I bought this kit in 1974 (when I was 10) with my newspaper round money. I loved this kit. It was made up of different colours and the wings folded up. Also, the plastic was far stronger than Airfix.
Midway was in June 1942, and it was the Douglas Dauntless (SBD) which sank 4 Japanese carriers in an afternoon. The SB2C (son of a b*tch 2nd class) Helldiver began to replace the Dauntless from 1943 - much to the chagrin of navy aircrews who preferred the older design. The Marines never adopted the Helldiver, and continued to use the Dauntless until 1945. That is, indeed, an internal bomb-bay with the usual swinging bomb-crutch. My example (bought/built 2002) was the Chinese reboxing, but for some reason it had rub-down transfers for some unknown reason, rather than waterslide decals.
Recall building this with the gunner pointing out the side.. Must have been airfix kit... Matchbox phantom my fave... Loaded wings with rocket launchers.. Looked awesome
... cradle forces bpmb clear of propeller - as in the Ju 87 too. Matchbox kits did quite often mix raised and engraved detail. often determined by which gate the part was on. ... like all matchbox kits featuring 'operable' outer wings, these droop noticeably (though not as bad as those in the A-4 Corsair!). ... didn't fit that well if I recall rightly.
I got this one last week at the hobby shop that has vintage kits these and it was still sealed for only $5 but I’ve noticed a difference in body color the one I have has a blue body not the grey one you have..did they all have deferent colors
Interesting thoughts about raised or engraved panel lines.... If you see photos of WWII aircraft fairly close to the fuselage, where, they're supposed to be flush-fitted, there always seems to be a slight lip, as one panel overlaps the following panel...this makes me think that maybe they were correct back then in representing so many of the panel lines as raised... Ok, in many cases they were too pronounced, but they can be sanded back - gently. With today's fashion for engraved panel lines, you lose that impression of the 'flush-fit' panels of the original aircraft...especially when some companies make the engraved panel lines look like trenches!! I have no problem with the older kits having raised panel lines because that's how they look in old photos too....as long as the lines aren't too steep and needing sanding back a bit!
Old school raised panel lines are easy to sand off if one wants to rescribe or use pencil lines to represent the panels. The mad trencher of Matchbox fame means you have to do a lot of filling first. Scribing filler takes some finesse too. I am always surprised at how "smooth" aircraft are when compared to the typical 72 scale representation. Paper kits capture the skin-on-frame look quite well. As you note, fine raised lines capture how the light dances off the edge of panels. Thanks to the illusion of pre-shading, the scalloped effect can be done on styrene kits. It's that mottling of the colors that really makes a model look real --- and its really all in the mind (cue the Penn and Teller Fool Us theme...) Who dared to make large-run injection kits of a Wellesley, a Privateer and a Stranrear? Yes, only Matchbox. :-)
