MIflyer
1st Lieutenant
It has been said that the first rule of building plastic model kits is "Never Throw Anything Away." Items left over from completed kits can be useful, especially for kitbashing or scratch building. When I built my USAF Flying saucer I based it on the Squadron Haunebu II kit and also used parts from Hawk T-33A, Monogram P-61, Monogram P-38, the bottoms from Coke cans. and a hunk of an old radio tube.
Recently I was helping a friend work on his airplane and pointed out we needed some wooden dowels that we could sharpen and use to plug the holes in the rod ends after they had been greased. We found that we had no suitable wooden dowels but I suddenly realized that sprue from model kits would do the job nicely. I had thrown away a large amount of sprue left over from the Haunebu kit but still had some left, including some from a P-38 kit I probably built in the 1960's; that worked fine to plug the holes, better than the wood, in fact.
When I built that model decades ago I had no idea I would ever use some of it on a real airplane.
Recently I was helping a friend work on his airplane and pointed out we needed some wooden dowels that we could sharpen and use to plug the holes in the rod ends after they had been greased. We found that we had no suitable wooden dowels but I suddenly realized that sprue from model kits would do the job nicely. I had thrown away a large amount of sprue left over from the Haunebu kit but still had some left, including some from a P-38 kit I probably built in the 1960's; that worked fine to plug the holes, better than the wood, in fact.
When I built that model decades ago I had no idea I would ever use some of it on a real airplane.
