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Dirk's 1/72 Academy B-17E "Old 666" 43rd Bomb Group


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Last night I unmasked Old 666 and finished up the work on the cowling flaps. I then installed the engines and dry fitted the props.

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Feels like I'm starting to get a cold. Hopefully I'll get some more work of this one tomorrow

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  • 2 months later...

It's been some time since I worked on this project but i'm on a mission to clear up some of the unfinished kits I have laying around. First things first. All those pesky nose windows I put in before I joined the fuselage all fell out. Most of the windows were lost but those that weren't were damn near impossible to put back with the fuselage assembled. To fix this I broke out the Micro Krystal Klear and made my own windows.

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To do this all you need to do is dip a tooth pick into the solution and then swirl it around the window opening until you have a complete film over the opening.

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Now to the guns. :twisted: One of the extra guns Steve Zeamer added to his aircraft was one right outside his window on the nose. Now there are no photos that I know of to show how this was placed so I had to take some creative licensing and do what I think made sense. After the windscreen was in place the only location that made sense was in the top window just infront of the windscreen. All I did was add some Krystal Klear to the opening and stuck a single .50 cal machine gun.

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Time to get back to work. I will post more later on.

Edited by Dirkpitt289
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Next I moved on to the office of bombardier Joseph Sarnoski. The B-17E came with 3 guns fitted in the glass nose. Sarnoski swapped out the three .30 cal's and replaced them with .50's. He also added an additional .50 cal machine gun to the nose.

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Top turret in place

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Tail gun placement

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All the guns will be touched up a little later on.

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Last night I did a little more work on Old 666 continuing to mount all the machine guns. So far we installed the following:

2 .50's in the tail

2 .50's in the ball turret. These fell out during the masking for the paint and will have to be reinstalled :sad:

4 .50's in the nose

1 .50 in front of pilots windscreen

1 .50 mounted in the floor behind the waist gunner

Next I moved onto the waist gunners position.

Zeamer's crew put guns where they didn't even need guns, leaving loose machine guns on the catwalk so that if a gun jammed at a critical moment they could dump it and quickly replace it with a spare. Sergeant George Kendrick even mounted a gun behind the ball turret near the waist. "I don't know who would have handled that except the side gunner" Jay recalls. "He wanted all the guns he could get! He wouldn't let another gunner back there with him. He said, 'These are my guns. I'm going to shoot them all. I don't want to be bumping asses with another guy back here!' This was George Kendrick, the screwball of the crew."

Using the twin guns for the top and ball turret from the Green Hornet kit I went to work

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Using some of my Evergreen stock I made mounts for the guns.

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Next I moved over to the tail gunners position. I wanted to put the gun site in place

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With a pin vice and a very very tiny bit I set to work.

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I must say I'm happy with the results :-D

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Tonight I hope to figure out how to mount the radio gunners twin .50s

Thanks for looking

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I've been initiated with real world stuff so the modeling has been pushed to the side for a bit. Here is a little more work I got done on Old 666

A little bit of landing gear repair is in order. :crying2:

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Superchargers get their first bit of rust

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Toned down with some steel

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Superchargers in place. I think I need to tone them down a little bit more.

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Resin wheels to spruce it up a bit

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Resin wheel vs kit wheel

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Our little girl is growing up. This is here for the first time on all threes (Wheels that is :mrgreen: ) There is still a lot of touch ups and fiddly work to be done. I also need to give the new wheels a wash to bring out all that detail

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Thanks for looking.

Edited by Dirkpitt289
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I have to admit I've been pretty lax on the continued history of this aircraft. Personally I love this story and never tire of reading about it. Its truly amazing. I know a lot of you are up to date on this history but for those that have asked....

History of Old 666 continued

"Whenever the 43rd got a real lousy mission--the worst possible mission of all that nobody else wanted to fly--they went down to see Jay Zeamer and his gang," said Walt Krell. "They couldn't keep them on the ground, no matter how bad or rough that mission might be. They didn't care. They crawled into that airplane and just flew and what was more they always carried out their missions. It was the damnedest thing. They'd fly in the worst possible weather, the kind of storm that made other pilots grateful they were on the ground.

"And Zeamer would always find his way in. Sometimes the weather would be so bad, in ships that were shot up, other planes would crash, or the crews would bail out because it was impossible to get back down safely. Impossible for everyone except Jay Zeamer, that is."

One of Zeamer's missions over Rabaul was a psy-ops flight during which pamphlets were to be dropped. Approaching the enemy stronghold Zeamer told his crew, "Don't throw them out. I'll go down low enough so you can pass them out individually, but no lally-gagging around those geisha girls."

On a night mission over Wewak the Japanese gunners on the ground managed to fix the flight of incoming American bombers in the glare of several large search lights. Zeamer got mad and made good use of his specially designed nose gun. In an incredible display of courage and airmanship he dove on the positions, shooting out three of them and damaging two others. His actions enabled the squadron to complete its mission and get back safely. That action earned the renegade pilot an oak leaf cluster to his Silver Star.

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The Mapping Mission

The reconnaissance mission over Bougainville was simple in its concept:

Depart Port Moresby under cover of darkness.

Fly over 600 miles of open sea.

Arrive at the north end of the island shortly after dawn when there would be enough light to take photographs.

Slowly cruise southeast at an altitude of 25,000 feet while the camera clicked in the belly of the aircraft to record the terrain below.

Simple in concept perhaps, but the devil was in the details. Despite Allied air superiority over New Guinea and at Guadalcanal, Japan ruled the seas and the airspace from New Britain to Choisuel. A lone photo-recon aircraft might find itself hopelessly outnumbered and, for the mission to succeed not only did the photographs have to be taken, but the airplane carrying that camera had to be able to get that film safely home.

"That job had been hanging for months, and nobody else had been able to do it," Captain Zeamer wrote in a letter five months after the mission. "We just put extra guns all over our ship hoping to be able to fight our way clear. We had 19 machineguns which is more than any other Flying Fortress in the Southwest Pacific has ever thought of having."

By the time darkness fell over Port Moresby on June 15 Old 666 was armed to the teeth and ready for action. While the crew headed for their cots to get a good night's rest before their 4 a.m. takeoff, Captain Zeamer was given an additional last-minute order. While in the air over the coastline of Bougainville, he was instructed to fly over the smaller island of Buka which was separated by a thin waterway known as the Buka Passage. There he was to make a reconnaissance of the Japanese airfield there to determine logistics and enemy strength.

This new assignment changed the mission from being one of immense danger to one of sheer suicide. Captain Zeamer was furious. His mission was to photograph Bougainville and then get the images back home. A side trip over Buka would almost surely doom his airplane and crew, making the entire mission a futile waste. As he turned in for the night Zeamer had already made up his mind that he would photograph Bougainville, but he would not risk his men or his B-17 over Buka.

Old 666 lifted off from Port Moresby right on schedule at 4 a.m. In the clear Plexiglas nose Lieutenant Johnson plotted a course over 600 miles of open waters of the Solomon Sea. Nearby, Joe Sarnoski checked and double-checked the vertical camera switches he would activate when the time came for Sergeant Kendrick to begin his all-important work of taking pictures from further back in the belly of the Flying Fortress.

For three hours Old 666's four, big engines churned the air as Jay Zeamer flew into the rising sun and one of Japan's most fortified islands. Shortly before 0700 the faint dawn revealed the distant outline of Bougainville Island. The B-17 was thirty minutes ahead of schedule. The sun had not yet risen high enough to illuminate the island's west coast sufficiently for photographic purposes.

"Aw, hell...." Zeamer thought as he considered his early arrival and pondered the suicidal last-minute order he had previously determined to ignore. "Navigator, plot a course for Buka," he announced.

Minutes later a thin slip of water passed 25,000 feet below the Fortress, and then the dense jungle of Buka appeared in the lens of Kendrick's camera. Carved in the foilage below was a honeycomb of small airplane revetments, all leading to a massive airstrip. With a sinking feeling Captain Zeamer suddenly realized why headquarters wanted this recon--more than 400 enemy fighters had been flown into the Buka aerodrome the previous day.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I know its been a while and this isn't much but it is what it is. As you may remember the superchargers were way to bright with the rust color I used. So I went over them with Model Masters Exhaust. The cool thing about the exhaust is that its meant to be used with an airbrush but when I use it with a brush it doesn't completely cover. In this case the fust color bleeds through the exhaust just the right amount (IMHO)

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That's more like it.

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  • 2 weeks later...

The work is great! The history is incredible! What a subject to pick. The additions you've added are, well, what word haven't I used yet... fitting? Yes! I'm going to go back after and re-read all the posts with a cup o' jo.

Cheers!

Mark.

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Back to work on Old 666. Basically the work consisted of applying some decals and some weathering.

This kit didn't come with the correct decals for this bird so I had to go get some myself. I found these from Yellow Wings Decals

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Before

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After

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Next I'm going to figure out how to properly weather the decals to match the rest of the aircraft

Tools for decaling

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Thanks for looking

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  • 2 weeks later...

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