Once upon a time there was a guy named Rob Ferreira and he was a TreadHead. Unfortunately, unlike most TreadHeads, Rob just didn’t enjoy building a military vehicle and weathering it. Nope that was too easy. What Rob liked to do was take a military vehicle to it’s final resting place. Be it as a monument on display in the open, an old forgotten wreck sitting in some wooded area all but forgotten about, a vehicle destroyed by some catastrophe, or a vehicle sitting in a vehicle track park in Afghanistan. He created a website to showcase his work. http://www.scratchmod.com/
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In the late 1970s, Porsche was dominant in GT and sports racing. For the 1978 race season, Porsche designed the 935/79 Turbo with the goal of claiming the Le Mans 24 hours title. The new longer, ground-hugging body of the car pushed the limits on the silhouette regulation. Due to the 935/78's unique body design, the vehicle earned the nickname "Moby Dick". The vehicle featured a 3.2 liter, air-cooled twin-turbo engine with four valves per cylinder and Porsche's first liquid-cooled cylinder heads, which produced 850hp. The race team entered the 935/78 Turbo in the World Championships for Makes Round 4, as a test for the Le Mans race, and in an impressive debut won. At the 1978 Le Mans 24 Hours, the 935/78 qualified 3rd, but fell to an overall 8th place finish as a result of mechanical problems.
The line of Supermarine racers, designed to attack and eventually acquire the Schneider Trophy for Seaplanes, actually began with the S.4, a mid-wing cantilever monoplane with amazing aerodynamic form for its time, 1925. This floatplane racer was sent to the United States for the eighth Schneider Cup races at Baltimore, where it suffered a number of mishaps before it finally was wrecked when the pilot lost control, fortunately with no injuries. The race was won by Lt. Jimmy Doolittle, with the backup Gloster III placing second.
Every so often as a reviewer, you end up with a product that wasn’t quite what you thought it was. Thus was the start of this, where I had volunteered to review this new set from Aires covering A-7 landing gear bays in 1/48. However I thought they were for the Hasegawa kit, but alas, they are for the Hobbyboss kit! Knowing this occasionally happens to us as modelers, where we walk out of store with the latest aftermarket treasure only to find it’s for the other manufacturer’s kit, I set about to see how this set would fit in the Hasegawa 1/48 A-7E.
As a devotee of SciFi and the related genres, I was always a fan of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove. It had a great cast with George C. Scott, James Earl Jones, Peter Sellers and many more including the subject of this diorama, Slim Pickens as Major “King” Kong who most notably rides a nuclear bomb out of the bottom of a B-52 to detonate in Russia. I could go one more but you really need to watch is to appreciate the subtle and extensive humor thrown around.