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What scale is that? If you'd put the question to me during the first few years of my modeling way back Then, I'd have responded with a blank stare. Not only because I'd have no answer, nor a clue how to get it, but most of all because it would have baffled me why anyone would care. It's only since I returned from the Dark Ages in modern times that I've understood what I'd only vaguely remembered: that most kits listed no scale data, and were the size they were only out of consideration for economical manufacture and packaging: ‘Box Scale'. Not all, though. Some manufacturers, even back Then, were striving for standardization and accuracy. I'd built the Hawk Nieuport 17 and Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, the Lindbergh P-47 Thunderbolt and Chance Vought Corsair, and by far the best kit that I ever assembled back Then, the Monogram Douglas SBD Dauntless. All these were in one-quarter inch, or 1/48 scale. So were –at least approximately—the Aurora ‘Famous Fighters', many of which I built, although the full line had quite a few ‘box' scales in it, too.
After I started collecting these, I realized there were other makes in similar scale, such as that set of four Hawk economy fighters, all with the same description, that I've written about previously: the F4F Wildcat, Messerschmitt 109, Spitfire 22, and Zero. There was the Monogram ‘Forty-Niner'-series P-40 Warhawk. (Do understand it never occurred to me to take ruler in hand, measure my models, compare them to the specifications in David Cook's ‘Fighters That Made History', and work out how the models were actually scaled… wouldn't that have been like the ‘Story Problems' we all hated at school? As I only recently learned, Monogram's P-40 is a bit larger than 1/72 scale.) Given that I'd already had some 1/48 scale models, and now wanted a constant scale collection, why didn't I continue with 1/48? The answer is deeply rooted in economics: my allowance at the time was about 50¢ a week. (Boy, do I date myself!) Needing to keep myself in Pez, Turkish taffy, and ‘Milkshake' candy bars, my only hope to acquire a new model every week would be to stick with the Airfix series, which started at 39¢. The Monogram quarter-inch scale series I so admired, after getting the Dauntless (with its authentic bomb-dropping action), all cost 98¢, or in the case of the Lockheed P 38 lightning, $1.49. My ability to collect such kits would have been, at best, less than half the rate I could have from the Airfix-72 line. My modeling tapered off as I finished high school, worked at Safeway, got into motorcycling, and attended community college. The last model I built before the Dark Ages was a Junkers Ju 88, assembled from an AMT kit while I was in the dorm the first year at the University of Washington. It, too, was 1/72 scale. Memories of my modeling way back Then prompted me to look again at Monogram's series. I built anew the SBD Dauntless, taking great pleasure in remembering how the original had gone together, and although I didn't revert to my childhood running around the house on desperate bombing missions, you probably could have heard some low-voiced engine and machine gun noises coming from my workbench… I intend to eventually build all the planes from this Monogram series. Since the 1960s, when they were the best models I ever encountered, they've been surpassed not just by other manufacturers such as Hasegawa, Tamiya, and Eduard, but even by later efforts of Monogram itself (now Revell-Monogram). Their Heinkel 111, Dornier 335, and Messerschmitt 410 were all introduced to the modeling market after I'd first left it. Still, it's my ambition to build them all, old and new. A few are done already, including the Lockheed P-38 Lightning, and now I'm nearly done with an F6F Hellcat, which I admired back then but never built. They were fun to do.
Still, I built a couple of 1/72 kits as NABBROKEs (‘Nostalgic Aging Baby Boomer Real Old Kit Experience'), such as the Revell Hawker Hurricane and Bell P-39 Airacobra (see the picture of my first build, which somehow survived from way back Then, next to the Now re-build, backed by a new build of Monogram's 1/48 scale). I brought them to club meetings, a serious tactical blunder. Demonstrating I could build the smaller scale played into the hands of the evil Stephen Tontoni, and I must now finish a Fokker DXXI for the Spanish Civil War display he's about to install at the Museum of Flight here in Seattle. The small scale was picked partly to fit into the display case as many of the combatant planes of that tragic conflict (aka World War Two ‘rehearsal'), and partly because it's the scale Stephen and several other members of the club routinely make their contest-winning ‘gems' in…the scoundrels… One of whom is the evil Will Perry, who has the largest stash of all of us—more than five THOUSAND. When I protested I knew nothing, Nowadays, about 1/72 scale kits, and didn't even know if a Fokker DXXI was available, he serenely handed over an ‘Intech' kit, a Polish company's re-issue of the old Frog moldings. "It's not a bad kit; simple to build; you should have no trouble!"
But back to quarter-inch scale models I first encountered way back Then… the Lindberg Line was resurrected, no doubt partly due to modeling nostalgia, but also because even after all these years, no one else ever did, in this larger scale, planes such as the XF-88 Voodoo, the early Grumman Tiger, the Snark cruise missile…
Build what you want, the way you want to, and above all have fun! |
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