Condor 1/72nd A9

The Condor A9 kit can best be described as "the Condor V2 kit with an extra sprue of stuff." The only real change in the main fuselage halves is the provision of a hole where the cockpit goes. Construction is identical to the V2 kit except that instead of adding two fins at the base, one has to add two long wing-like chines that go almost the whole length of the rocket. It turned out to be less troublesome than I expected, though I did a lot of dry-fitting because there is no practical way of forcing ill-fitting chines against the fuselage (at least that I could think of). They aren't quite the same length either; I dressed the leading edges of the long one to bring them to the same length.

The interior parts consist of a couple of bulkheads, a seat, a stick, and a tiny vacuum-formed canopy. I somehow lost the canopy, so I filched a canopy from the Condor A4b kit and made a push-mold by pressing it into a block of warm clay. I let the clay cool overnight and pulled the canopy out, then poured in JB Weld. The resulting canopy was sanded, cleaned up, painted gloss black, and added to the model.

I couldn't face masking another three-color splinter scheme, so I decided on a hard-edged "vein" scheme of grauviolett and schwartzgrun with red fin tabs. The decals are a combination of Condor and spares; the swastikas in particular were taken from a Ministry of Small Aircraft Fw-190 sheet.

For some reason I didn't want to pose it on a launch table (or perhaps I just didn't want to build another launch table) so I scratchbuilt a Vidalwagen trailer out of brass rod, ABS "angle iron", wheels filched from an old Airfix tank transporter, and a variety of junk salvaged from the spares box. I added an old Hasegawa Sdkfz-7 prime mover and made a base out of a piece of pine and a bunch of Sculptamold.