And so I began the surgery.  The kit really has only about fifteen pieces, more or less.  The fit is poor, because it’s a snap-kit and is made to be slammed together with the modeling equivalent of a nine-pound railway hammer.  I dug out my trusty-rusty Dremel (which really is rusty from many years in Hawaii) and ground out all the internal fittings to make room for the fun stuff.

 I started out with wheels.  The kit comes with only a stand, so I cut a couple of convenient panels out of the bottom of the ship and, test-fitting and test-fitting, grafted in wheel wells made from half of a wading snorkel of an Academy Patton tank, bits of scrap card plastic, plastic rod for piping and wires, the landing gear from a dearly departed Monogram Su-25 Frogfoot attached to the wheels of an old Otaki FW-190A.  The tail wheel is a Monogram A-10 nose wheel glued to an Otaki F4U-1D tail wheel strut/arrestor hook assembly, and the gear doors are merely scrap sheet stock.  Even though it doesn’t look like it, there really is room for the wheels in the wheel wells. 

 After test-fitting the landing gear and setting them aside to dry and then paint, I went to town on the cockpit.  The seat and consoles are from an old Academy F-14 Tomcat, as befitting the Naboo’s newly-acquired Naval heritage, and the stick is from a ProModeler Ju-88A-4 (I believe).  Boy, let me tell you, it took a LOT of shoving and cursing to get the entire cockpit into that shallow little area, but I did manage it.  Just don’t get too close to it with a flashlight.

 Basic construction, otherwise, went as well as can be expected, meaning you can successfully build anything with enough methyl-ethyl-ketone.  First, I assembled the wings and filled and sanded the join, and then I cut them apart to make the wingfolds.  Discovering there are huge locating holes in the fuselage, I filled those with bits and bobs from the scrap box, including bomb racks from a Monogram B-17G.  I glued the fuselage halves (top and bottom) together and set it aside with a prodigious amount of tape on it to dry, and then went about creating the wingfolds.  I faired them in with rod plastic, shaving a bit off here and there to make it mate up as well as I could (remember, I’m not trying to build a real model here) and then attached the whole kit and caboodle to the lower fuselage. I even gave it guns.

 I filled and sanded, attached the engines and engine tail boom thingies (I’m sure someone who actually thought that movie was good can tell me what those things are supposed to be), and then cut off the tail.  I had intended to make the tail fold sideways, like the Sea King helicopters, and attached it that way originally.  But BOY did it look dumb.  So I notched it on top for a hinge, added a couple of bulkheads and made it fold upwards.  It’s a little poky-looking on top but I think it looks much better.  

Paint was straightforward.  The lighter grey is standard Polly-Scale Light Gull Grey, the blue is, I believe, Navy Non-Spec Intermediate Blue, and the darker grey is Dark Ghost Grey.  I wasn’t trying to be particularly accurate; I was using what I had in my paint drawer.  Decals are from an old Superscale F-14 subdued sheet, mixed with aggressor numbers from deep in the dark recesses of my decal dungeon. 

 It won the Build-the-Same-Kit contest.  I thought that that was the funniest part of the whole deal.

 Overall, this project was a hoot.  I will never build a Naboo in its “authentic” garb, because as I said before I think it’s hideous.  But this way it makes for an interesting conversation piece, and I can look at my model shelves and giggle at it occasionally.

Jim Baker

June 2003