History

The B-52 is arguably the best bomber ever made. First deployed in 1955 as a high altitude “atomic bomber” later versions of it are still in use today.

The Kit

Inside the box you will find 8 sprues of light grey and clear injected plastic. An 8-page instruction manual and a nice sheet of decals. Basically, only the fuselage halves and sprue F are new to this kit as everything else comes from, and is marked, for the B-52H kit. The one minor hitch here is that the very fine panel lines in the wings do NOT match those on the fuselage as these are more Matchbox like. The decal sheet is very nice and in register.

Construction

14 steps are used to make this kit and the first 6 deal with the fuselage, wings, stabilizers and flaps (which you can pose closed or open). Steps 7-9 are the assembly and instillation of the engines and wing tanks. A couple items that I dealt with here are that I left the flaps off until later (so I wouldn’t break them off) and also the engines until after the main body was painted (much easier to deal with that way). As far as the engines go, they went together well but did not fit on the pylons as the area where pylon and nacelle meet was off by about 1/16 on an inch. I just lengthened the point on the rear area of the nacelles and it was fixed. Also, the wind screen is the same one used for the H model and it does not fit this fuselage very well ad there is a gap at the rear of each side and will need to be filled.

Steps 11-14 are for wheel & strut assembly and instillation, tail gun instillation and external bomb rack assembly & instillation. Except for the engines and the windscreen, everything fit pretty well. And only a little filler was needed in the wing roots.

Finishing

I used Testors enamel SAC Bomber Green (FS34159), SAC Bomber Tan (FS34201) & Dark Green (34079) and Tamiya SG Black (X-18) for this kit. You get two marking options for this kit:

• B-52D 56-0584, 22^nd BW, Thailand, December 1972.
• B-52F 57-0144, 3960^th SW, Guam, 1966.

The decals went on easy and settled down pretty much on their own. I did use a little Micro Set just to be safe though.

Conclusion

It’s about time we got a new early B-52 kit and this one is nice. I recommend it to all modelers.

I would like to thank Minicraft for supplying this kit and IPMS for allowing me to build it.