Minicraft 1/144 RB-29 'Wreck of the Kee Bird'

[NightTrain288]

First build on the forums!
Here i'll be building the Minicraft 1/144 RB-29 kit with a set of aftermarket decals to model it into the B-29 Kee Bird who forcefully landed in Greenland in 1947 after running out of fuel on a secret navigation mission. The story of the bird is that a team went to try and recover it and filmed a documentary on the recovery effort. I won't spoil anything about the story but i'll link it here as it is very interesting.

I plan on building the Kee Bird based on these images in the state it was found in 1994, sitting in a lakebed for 47 years.




The kit itself is a tiny one with not much detail and is a really unassuming kit but I hope the decals and the fact that the plane will be sitting partially in a water diorama will really make this more of a weathering experiment.

[ForeverPlasticKits]

Have fun building it!

[NightTrain288]

I've completed a few steps in the basic construction of the model already and that'll be posted here,



Started with the assembly of the fuselage and having little to no interior detail it set a record time for any aircraft i've done as to how speedy this construction is. Test fitting the fuselage halves and everything seemed to be aligned good enough so after the turrets and window side panels were fitted the halves were glued together.



The instructions then called for the horizontal stabilizer to be fitted and it has to be basically slid through the model which after some sanding caused a gap to form along the rear spine of the fuselage. I didn't want to sand the root fitting to much away as that would make a more difficult gap to fill and sand then just the fuselage spine.



The overall result looks good and using some CA glue i worked the aft joints that had gaps in to where they would stick together firmly. The build thus far is really solid and easy to complete in such a small scale. The wing halves were then glued together quickly and a minor amount of flash was removed.

[BigWall]

Nice work and a great idea for a diorama!

[Stokesy44]

Interesting subject.

I saw the documentary, such a shame how it ended and I remember one of the team passing away during the recovery efforts too. Very sad.

[aur0ra145]

Very cool subject, I'll follow this build with interest!

[NightTrain288]

For those who were following this build I apologize for the lack of updates, during the move the model got crushed by a very unfortunately placed box. Thankfully it's an inexpensive kit but I plan on building one in the future with a different kit.

[Garion77]

That's too bad ! Sorry for you !

[aur0ra145]

Oh no!

[RangerNeil]

Damn! That's bad news....

[digger303]

That sucks, but I guess you weren't too far down the build road and didn't loose a lot of invested time and effort.