1/72 Academy B-17F to BQ-7 conversion

Gallery Article by Peter Kormos on May 21 2010

 

This project started as usually as the others... I was browsing through the modeling resources... this time it was the AWF forum, where someone posted photos of a B-17 model with open cockpit and "spider web" painted on the white wings of the plane... I said what??? I have to build this cool model, too! After some search, I managed to get in touch with the modeler, Olaf Krabbenhöft from Germany. Olaf was kind enough to share his gathered infos on the project, and that was enough for me to kick into the project...
Later, I found Guy King's excellent model here on ARC too, so I thought my model's best place on the Net is here on ARC as well..

History
Guy's article (http://www.aircraftresourcecenter.com/Gal4/3801-3900/gal3809_B-17_King/00.shtm) contains a brief history of the "Project Aphrodite" and "Gremlin Gus II", so I wouldn't like to reproduce what's written there. On the other hand, I can also recommend Jack Olsen's book that Guy mentioned. This is a very, very well written book, and anyone who has a hint of interest in Aphrodite Project or B-17's will find this book an excellent read! 

In my understanding, "Project Aphrodite" was a complete failure. Despite it's short life with the unit, some photos of "GG II" can still be found in books and on the Internet. 
I think 3 different configurations of the plane are photo documented:

1. "GG II" with upper deck in place with her original unit at 388 BG.
2. "GG II" without upper deck but with 2*3 Azon antennas on the nose and astro-dome still in place.
3. "GG II" without upper deck, without astro-dome (covered with sheet aluminium) and without Azon antennas on the nose.

I decided to model #2 option, because I thought this was the most attractive one...
Since I first contacted Olaf, years have passed and in early 2008, the time has come to start this modeling project... and it was only early 2010 when I finished it.

Model
This time, I decided to use the Academy kit. So far I've only built the old Revell and the Academy kits in 1:72 scale, but I think - at least because of the negative panel lines - the Academy kit is a better option than the Hasegawa kit. 

Cockpit, interior of the fuselage
I think even in 1:48 scale, detailing the interior of the B-17 model is a complete waste of time, because nothing is visible from the interior in the completed model. Maybe the only exceptions are the nose compartment and the radio operator's room. But because I was building a cabrio plane, CMK's resin interior seemed a reasonable detail set for me. The CMK cockpit is really beautiful, but unfortunately we get nothing for the nose where the detail is really needed...

One disadvantage of the Academy kit is that the clear parts fit very badly into the fuselage halves. So first I glued all the windows in place with CA, and then filled the cavities with putty, and sanded everything into shape. Then I took the 0.5 mm Evergreen square strips and built up the internal stiffeners, formers in the nose area. I didn't want to over detail the interior, because "GG II" was stripped of all useless materials, so I only but some electrical boxes and wires into the nose and cockpit. The PE's that we get with the CMK kit is also useful, I only found the control stick too flat in PE, so I scratch built them from thin soldering iron.

After the moderate detailing was done, I painted the interior in Bronze green and picked out the electric devices in black. The electric cables were painted in white, with one or two left in yellow to spice up the overall look of the small interior.

Removing the fuselage upper deck was easy, but filling up the big opening with sheet styrene, putty-ing and sanding everything into shape took quite a while... 
The bomb bay doors doesn't fit well, so I glued then to the fuselage halves before the assembly. I did the same with the tail section as well. The seam line runs exactly across the tail gunner's rear window, so I had to remove the clear part there and replace it with sheet clear film.

We get an "universal right hand side fuselage" so it's up to the version that we are building where we put (cut out the holes) the waist windows.

The base model I used was a F version, but I needed the chin gun positions for "GG II". I had some clear parts left from my previous project so I had the parts for these. The only difficulty was to cut the openings for the chin gun positions and to swap the clear parts. The port side went to the starboard side and vice versa. "GG II" had the chin gun ports sealed so I had to seal the clear parts too, and had made clear resin copies of them... 

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Wings
The first thing I did on the model was to remove the control surfaces and later glue then back into place in a bit offset position at the end of the construction.

There are two major problems with the wings: 1. the air intakes in the wings' leading edges are missing, these had to be rebuilt from sheet stryrene. 2. The wing dihedral is too big, so I had to use 0.3 mm spacer at the top of the wing halves. After the wings were assembled, I checked some line drawings and real photos and tried to fix the panel lines, that I thought were in wrong place or were missing...

Engines
The turbos are not overly detailed, but are OK in this scale. The top of the exhaust tubes are missing, so these had to be filled with sprue bits and then the tubes were opened with a drill bit.

The original engines are quite toy like, so I bought the Quickboost B-17 engine set and converted them into a version that are more convenient for the B-17. The propeller hubs are from the Quickboost B-25 set, and were also upgraded a little, because these are just a little bit better than the Hasegawa B-25 hubs. I also bought the Quickboost corrected engine cowlings, that are much better looking than the original ones, but I also further detailed them a little to please my detailing appetite... Finally here on the detailing part, I took one propeller blade, reshaped it (because the original's shape at the root is completely wrong) and had made resin copies of it...
The interior of the engine cowlings got a coat of Interior green, but maybe I should have painted them in aluminium... The crank case got a middle grey color, cylinders got aluminium, pushrods got black and ignition harness received rust color.

Gear bays
The gear bays are completely empty, so I had to rebuild them from the Eduard PE set and spiced up the details with scratch building. The gear bays got interior green, the piping was left in natural metal and the oil tank was painted in black. The gear actuating mechanism is OK, but I completely rebuilt it from Evergreen stock, hypo needle and thicker aluminium foil. The original Academy tires are completely wrong, so I bought the True Details 'flat' tires. The wrinkles on the TD wires were sliced off a little and sanded into shape. There's also too big gab between the hub and the tire, so that was filled up with putty.

Riveting
I usually do the riveting after the main components are assembled, but before the whole model is glued together. This time I used the rivet plans from AJ Press' B-17 book. On my previous model, I applied less rivets on the wings, but it took 3 weeks to complete riveting. This time I added all the dense riveting, and managed to finish the work in 1,5 weeks. I don't know how I did it, but I sure was happy to finish this fast... :-)

Painting
First I painted the aluminium areas with Alclad aluminium. Then came Gunze's Neutral grey and Olive drab. The white on the wings were painted on with Tamiya's acrylic white, and the "spider web" on the wings were painted on with a highly diluted Gunze olive drab. All markings were painted on the model with custom made masks, except for the nose art and small markings there that were designed on my computer and printed to decal paper. The distinctive exhaust markins were painted on free hand with highly diluted mix of black and brown and I used triangle shaped masks around the wing air vents. Panel line wash was done with Tamiya black enamel, oil spills and such dirt was reproduced with black artist's oil paints. 

Final construction
Navigation lights were made with PK Tinyland navigation light making tools, and the Squadron vacuum-clear parts were glued in place, along with the fragile bits like antennas and gears. I didn't put any aerial on the model because I couldn't identify them on the archive photos.

Resources:

  • AJ Press: B-17 Flying Fortess

  • Squadron Signal: B-17 Flying Fortess Walkaround

  • Aero Detail: B-17 Flying Fortess

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my friends, Szilárd Jobbágy for the resin copies, Peter Tóth for the custom decals, Csaba Bordács and Robert Rácz for the custom made masks. Special thanks goes to Olaf Krabbenhöft, Karl Hauffe, Job Conger, Joseph Baugher, Chris Mansfield, Mike Bates and Don Mackay for the help in the research work.

Peter Kormos

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Photos and text © by Peter Kormos