I am building a 1/72 B1-B for the wife. The kit is terrible.
The upper and lower fuselage halves were warped and I had to correct that. Now my next problem…
The wife wants a “gear up” model to hang from her ceiling at work. The kit ONLY has a gear down version with the bomb bay open. Has anyone worked around this problem? If so, how did you do it and how did it turn out? Are there any AM products that address this?
Thanks in advance for your help.
If I can do this right, the wife is trying to get me a tour of the B1-B and B-2 facility at the local base.
Hi Kurt! I’d get this one right if I were you! That tour sounds like it would be worth the effort! When I did mine eons ago, I glued the bomb bay doors shut, filled the seams with gap-filling super glue and plastic strip and then rescribed the door outlines. Ditto for the gear doors. It turned out pretty good considering I was a not-very-experienced modeler. The only AM parts for the B-1B that I’m aware of is the featherless exhaust nozzles from Cutting Edge www.meteorprod.com for late Bones. Hope this helps.[:)]
Bert
I have plans in the future to do the huge Monogram 1/48 scale lancer, Its an expensive kit but it looks lkike it would be worth it. Does anyone have any experiece with that big kit?
Bstrump - Thanks, that was what I was looking at doing. Hope the hands are steady.
Fighterguru - I hope that you don’t have a warping problem with yours. Good Luck.
Stlios - I saw the 1/48 kit but it was a little too large for her office.
All I know about any B-1 AM stuff is that the December release list from Eduard has a PE set listed as “1/48 B-1 Exhaust.” with a whopping $30 price tag. I didn’t order a review copy it because I didn’t think there would be enough interest. I will get it and see what it’s about, and I will check on 1/72 parts from the Czechs, Kurt. See me on the back channel and we’ll talk.
Why do these specialized fixes an updates, like four PE exhaust cans, cost $30 bucks, when in November I got this beautiful color set for the Mig-21 in the same scale, which has parts to replace the entire cockpit, tub and all, for the Academy 1/48 kit, plus another fret for exterior parts, and it’s ten bucks cheaper than a fix for the exhausts. And there again, for my AcMin B-25G, another company’s resin corrected engine nacelles go for $25 a pair plus shipping. I realize that since there’s no huge volume or demand for such things they have to price them a bit higher, but how much can it cost to cast a pair of engine nacelles after you’ve recovered the cost of making the molds which were, after all, constructed directly from corrected kit nacelles (which these obviously are). As said earlier, I’m doing my own nacelle correction. It’s not that major.
Tom.
Pt. II Well, I must eat my words. After Kurt and I talked on the phone, out of curiosity I went to the Eduard web site to look at these PE exhausts. I have to say, if I was building the model and had the money, I wouldn’t think twice about getting them. They are dazzling with detail (and definitely not for PE beginners). If you want to see them, go to www.eduard.cz and do a search for B-1B. (Sorry, I forgot the part no.) Click on the photo of the fret and you’ll get a larger photo of the parts, and photos of the finished product. It’s dazzling. And the three-fret set for the whole kit, which is separate, is also quite thorough. As for the 1/72 kit, Eduard does not have it listed, but Twobobs makes AM decals for it. I just saw the sheet listed on their email newsletter and apparently there’s nose art. I didn’t check Meteor Productions’ site, but they may have some AM parts for the 1/72 BONE.
M068,
You didn’t say which kit but get the Monogram and a back issue of FSM (a year or 2
ago, I think). Paul Boyer tells every thing you need to do it RIGHT !! Never use the
old Airfix kit and…
Good Hunting,
G.W.
Fighter Guru, go to ARC’s Jet modeling forum, do a B-1B search, & that should bring up the thread for the 1/48th B-1B. Lots of good ifo & pics (including some of my own) that should help.
I’d like to resurrect this thread to request some help with a model I’m building now. I’ve been working on the 1/72 Revellogram B-1B, and I’m looking for as much accuracy as possible.
Does anyone know where I can get, or how to make some featherless exhaust nozzles? I’m finding them severely hard to find (aka impossible) to find these in 1/72 scale.
I’m also looking for a Sniper Pod. Long story short, I cut that ugly optical sensor off the bottom of the model, and I wanted to put an aggressive looking Sniper Pod in it’s place.
Any help with these would be greatly appreciated. Thanks much,
Ain’t the Revell and Monogram B-1 kits in both scales one and the same. I started the Monogram kit yearsago, had it almost finished. But it got damaged and now i have the Revell one in the stash and it looks the same.
There were a couple of the 1/48th kits built for the Swing Wing GB, might want to check that out.
Yes, both are the same. I’ve got Monogram and Revell versions and they are identical…except for the color of the plastic, of course ): and the decals vary from issue to issue of the kit.
I stole mine off of an F-15E but I think they use an updated version now that flight testing has ended and the pod is in use. Skunk Models sells weapons sets that have the newer version of the Sniper Pod. I am not sure if they make it in 1/72.
I built my B-1B in 1/48, and while the kit is technically more of an A, for the size and all involved it was a great kit. Also, I think I paid $50 for it. Considering the size, that is a steal.
Before you think about stealing the nozzles from a pair of F-15s for the exhaust, forget it. The F-15 exhausts are a smaller diameter. I tried that. I couldn’t find the cutting edge set and I was unwilling to pay what people seemed to be asking anyway. You can do some improvements though. You can remove the bumps just before the exhaust, and you can add some of the vanes inside the intakes fairly easily with some sheet styrene.
not ):