This is a build I've had in mind for a couple of years now, albeit I'm going to be doing it in a form very different to how I initially envisaged it.
There's a bit of background to this. A while back I bought the Revell 1/72 Lanc, the one with the striking yellow-finned bomber on the box, and that was the scheme I originally intended to do. However my imagination was caught by the other OOB scheme, W4964/WS-J with its distinctive Johnnie Walker whisky nose art, as flown by No. 9 Squadron from RAF Bardney. "J-Johnny" was one of the few "ton-up Lancs", returning from over a hundred missions unscathed. I then found that the aircraft has its very own exhaustively researched and hugely detailed biography in Gordon Thorburn's
Luck of a Lancaster:
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Amazon product ASIN B00FOGG2HU
View: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Luck-Lancaster-operations-killed-action-ebook/dp/B00FOGG2HU/
I managed to get hold of a second-hand (ex-library, actually) copy and read it from cover to cover in a few days. I'll go into the story of J-Johnny in more detail in the course of the build, but suffice to say that I was captivated by this particular Lanc (I wasn't aware at the time that I'd actually seen a part of the aircraft in my local air museum many times – more on that later!) Deciding I wanted to do her and the brave airmen who crewed her justice within my modest abilities, I switched to the new-tool Airfix kit, which apparently is a more faithful representation, particularly where wing dihedral is concerned; I don't normally care about these things too much, but as I say I wanted to do the best I could with this one. I got hold of the appropriate decal sheet from Kitsworld (much better printed than the Revell decals, it has to be said), and it's sat in my stash ever since.
Recently I've jumped scales from 1/72 to 1/48 and have gone back to my first love, the Supermarine Spitfire, and have been enjoying working in this aging-eyesight-friendly scale. Then I read about the release of a new
1/48 scale Lanc kit by Hong Kong Models, coming in at an eye-watering hundred quid plus, but this is a special one, right? So while I've not yet worked out where I'll put the thing, that's what I've decided to build.
At present I have the kit on back-order, and am in no desperate rush to get started, but with that saying about a journey of a thousand steps in mind I've decided to get a thread started. This build will probably take a good while, in that I'm going to do bits of it when I feel like taking a bit of time off the Spits rather than doing a one-push build. I feel it's one that's worth taking my time over.
Thanks for looking in.
Tony