Accidentally smudged the bomber’s viewport… I guess there’ll be a lot of stray bombs :P And here you can partly see the clear plastic “splint” I used to support the broken rear landing gear

Hell. Yes. It took me a LONG long time, but I have finished my first (and maybe last) level 5 revell model!

Ladies and gentlemen, I am proud to present to you the “Memphis Belle” B-17 Flying Fortress (scaled model). Able to carry up to 4800 pounds (2200 kg) of bombs, able to fly up to speeds of 287 mph (462 km/h) and also other facts that I might as well just say are from wikipedia, so if you’re interested go check it out.

But seriously, I very much love this model I made (even though I don’t make many aircraft models) and I’m also glad I could finish it right before university started again. Again I’ll say that the airframe is about as long as my forearm, while the wingspan is even longer! I also don’t usually paint my models, but I had to make an exception for this. I also usually don’t put on all the decals, but since I was painting it, I might as well go all the way! The one ‘incorrect’ thing in my model are the exterior bombs: apparently they’re only for the “Meat Hound” version, but that version is dumb and stupid, and exterior bombs look really cool so I added them anyway. Also as I said, the rear landing gear (or wheel, rather) broke off while I was painting it (probably from me leaning too much on the plane to stabilize my hand while painting), but I was able to fix it with a clear bit of plastic. Well, maybe not fix, but at least solve the problem. Also when I finished painting the camo (which was the last real thing I painted), it seemed a little weird. Luckily it looked much better after I applied the decals. But of course my troubles didn’t stop there, because one of the decals ripped. I was able to put it back, but I decided (after some advice from my mom) to put a coating on the decals. But then that looked weird (just on the decals), so I had to go for a full coating. And then (of course) I had problems with the brush, as in, it was losing hairs that were hard to find in the wet, white coating and only became visible when it hardened and turned clear. But despite that I was able to make a damn fine looking model (not perfect, I admit, but still really nice). What surprised me (in hindsight) was that the painting and decals took much longer than the actual putting together of the model.



Some cool stuff about the model is that the top turret, propellers and ball turret are all moveable. I even made gifs for the latter 2:

Now some final notes:

I’d like to say, just like I did with my lunar module model (and maybe could have done with my corsair model) that the people manning these planes were ultimate, brave bad-asses. The Memphis Belle is known because it was one of the first B-17s to complete 25 missions with her crew intact. Just think about that for a moment, and what the inverse means: not many bombers could even complete 25 missions without everyone surviving. And the crew knew that.

Then I’d want to point everyone interested to this B-17 propeller noise generator, a pretty cool white-noise thingy.

I’d also like to thank my mom for help on multiple things, such as pictures, advice,….

Also, the background used in the gif is taken from Warthunder (imo a pretty fun, free, online, WWII dogfighting game)

And also thanks to anyone who took their time to read this, or whoever is interested in any of this stuff.

Also, I skipped dinner to get these pictures out before I went to bed, so you guys better enjoy it!