I really love the DC-10/MD-11 family, and they’re basically my favorite aircraft (asides from the 747). I also have a weird fascination with firefighting aircraft, so that’s the birth of this project. A few weeks ago, I had a video of one of the old 10 Tanker drops on the Palisades Fire pop into my feed. This one hit a closer to home because I had family members near the very close vicinity of the fire at the time. I want to make this model as kind of a homage/tribute piece for front-line emergency response workers. If you are reading this and are from any emergency response work, thank you so much for all you do in protecting people (as well as my family) in the past. 10 Tanker is a private company that works on a contract basis around the globe responding to wildfires. They operate a group of DC-10-30s (VLAT) to specifically fight fires. I will be building the very first converted tanker, which actually was a DC-10-10! I also wanted to work in a manageable scale, so I looked toward the 1/200 offerings, and there were none. 
That being said I began a hunt for a DC-10 model, and I saw the exorbitant prices. As a college student, I didn’t want to dole out my life savings (and emergency Taco Bell run money), so I kept looking. I ultimately found the Hasegawa/Minicraft offering in 1/200 for 40 bucks, so I bought that pretty fast. That recently came in the mail, and it looks pretty good at first glance! I started to look at a lot of references for the aircraft and gathered half-decent measurements of the tank at the bottom.
On the building side, I’ve been working on cleaning up the fuselage and engine 2/vert stab. This kit is pretty old. A quick check on scalemates dates the original mold back to 1980 with my version being printed in the same year, so it takes the cake as the oldest kit I’ve ever built. Because of the age, there are a bunch of raised detail as well as windows on the kit that I had to fill in. The little sharpie marks are the areas that I need to putty a little because I ripped off some of the filler after it dried cries. It’s a lot worse on the side that you don’t see lol.
I designed the tank in CAD and sent it over to a guy on Fiverr, and it looks great!
Here’s the final state of the kit as of now! Thanks for checking out my work!
