Some more things I found in the project box which I had forgotten about

[kitnut617]

Because my Dad served in 617 Sqn form 1944 to 46. I got very interested in Tallboys and Grand Slams.  I would dig around to see what I could find about these big bombs.  I discovered that the USAAF was very interested in them, especially as they were finding the Japanese dug into hillsides and had major pillboxes for defenses.

I eventually found out that Boeing and the USAAF did a number of tests using B-29's as carrier planes and that the B-29 could actually carry two Grand Slams and take them to the height that Barnes Wallace had designed them to be dropped at.  Some enquiries to Boeing's Archive Department led to me buying a couple of photos from them, the first one I bought showed what was labelled a Grand Slam hanging half in/half out of a B-29's fuselage with some specially cut-to-fit bomb doors.  After getting out my models of a B-29 and the Airfix Lancaster B.1 Special I realized that the bomb in the photo was actually way bigger than a British Grand Slam.  I wrote back to Boeing and after a little chat with the curator of the Archives bought another photo, this showed a B-29 carrying two British Grand Slams under the wings between the fuselage and inner engine nacelles.  A note which came with the photo told me that the first photo I got was actually of the American Grand Slam, otherwise know as a T.12.  This was a scaled up British Grand Slam of 44,000 lbs, twice the weight of a British Grand Slam.  I thought I would build a B-29 like this.  Found out later that a B-36 could carry 'two' of these, or 'four' British Grand Slams.

Here's a couple of pics of a Paragon Designs 1/72 Tallboy, an Airfix 1/72 Grand Slam and my 1/72 T-12.  This was made be scaling photos I eventually found of the T.12.

[kitnut617]

Some other things I have made, I've been looking at pictures of different nuclear weapons and I wanted to use some on a couple of my models.  First one I did was after I had got some F-84's of different marks.  A couple of photos in F-84 in Action show anF-84E and an F-84F carrying a Mk.7 shape and then later in F-105 in Action there was a photo of a Mk.4 (I think) so I scratch built a couple, in this photo for the F-105 bomb I started of with a shape from the B-58 kit, seen on the right.  The two mounted on the rack are for my B-47 but I will have to change then to look like the F-105 ones I think.

[kitnut617]

Other things I made which I had the fanciful idea of maybe marketing, 1/72 200 Gal. and 100 Gal. Mosquito drop tanks, these will go back to the bottom of the box, Paragon came out with them already.  I bought some of Paragons tanks just to see how well I did, I came pretty close to what Neil did and for the 200 Gal. tank all I had was two photos to work from.

But I might do these, 1/72 200 Gal, and 100 Gal. DH Hornet drop tanks.  I made these after getting some photos from the DH Museum.