I recently fnished Revell’s PBY-5 and not long after it was completed, the landing gear failed and if any of you have built this 1/48 Catalina you know that once you close up the fuselage it is just about impossible to re-cement the gear if it fails. So I removed all of the gear and remade it into a retracted gear aircraft. Now comes the question–does anyone out there know of a company that makes a beaching dolly for this model?? By the way, I made my own dolly but would like to replace it with something more sturdy. Jack R.
Don’t think I’ve ever seen a PBY on a beaching dolly, just the gear that was dedicated to the non-amphibian versions. I’m guessing anything believable would work, since it would have to be something made “in the field”.
I built the older version of the PBY, the one without landing gear and I think the plane had 3 wheels on struts that the ground crew fitted to both sides of the fuselage and an “A” frame type of dolly for the tail. Ill look for the instructions to verify that and get back to you. Ill also try to scan the drawing into my computer and e-mail it to ya…if you`d like. Len
I made one too, I made it from styrene using various I-beams and other angles. I modeled it after those I saw for early seaplanes. It still might be somewhere in my spares stash…next time I go looking for something I will scan for it. I keep a list of things I need to find.
You can always hang it from a wall like I did with one of mine.
!(http://i163.photobucket.com/albums/t320/hawkeyes_bucket/Misc Stuff/pby.jpg)
Not my model, but it shows the beaching gear used on the PBY-5… The PBY-5A (which is the Amphibian and has landing gear) didn’t use it, AFAIK…
True Details makes a set of wheels for the beaching dollies on the PBY5 and 5A. You will have to make the struts from sprue.
http://www.squadron.com/ItemDetails.asp?item=TD48095
The first PBY Monogram produced was the -5, it came without the amphibian landing gear. The kit included the dollies and wheels of which True Details has made a replacement set. You might want to see if anyone has built the -5 and didn’t used the dollies.
I think a scratchbuilt beaching dolly would be more authentic as a -5A would not have the hardpoints necessary to attach the Consolidated beaching gear.
Have you considered displaying your Cat in the water? You could very easily do a plaster display base that’s about the length of the hull an maybe a couple inches wider and put your Cat in it’s secondary element… I’d happy to help you out with the construction details of the plaster “water”… All it takes is a mold box, some aluminum foil to make the “waves”, and some tempera paints… Here’s my plaster water for my Kingfisher dio (which I STILL haven’t finished…)…
Doing it for the 'Cat would be easy enough, and since you aren’t doing a diorama and don’t need the floats in the water, you don’t need to have it cover the entire area that the model would take up…
An alternative to plaster water is to find a piece of old plastic shower door or drop-down ceiling panel that has a “wave-like” texture… It’d be a lot lighter than plaster and easy enough to build a box-type base out of…
Actually the 5A does have the same hard points as the 5.
They would use the beaching gear when doing maintenance on the main gear.
There are plenty of pix of this availble on the net.
E…
Thanks guys for your very quick replies to my problem. I will check out True Details and if unsuccessful I’ll consider mounting it on “water”.