Von Braun Finis!

Well, I think I'm finally done with the Von Braun Three-Stage Ferry Rocket. This is as done as it's ever going to get, anyway. Please ignore the dinosaur in the upper right corner; he was cautioned several times about not blocking the shot and there he is...

Anyway, what's relevant? Note the cut-down delta wing and the end caps on the shuttle itself, which I think looks better than the humungo-wing on the original part. Also note that I finally did add instrumentation pods to the tips of the first-stage fins. Two of them are cut-down bits of anonymous 1/72nd scale AIM-7 Sparrows; the other two are cut-down 5-inch "Holy Moses" rockets from a Monogram 1/48th scale P-38 Lightning kit. They're faired into the fins, and the fins are faired into the fuselage itself, with multiple layers of white glue.

What else? I lost the tube that represented the third stage, so while I was looking for stuff to make the pods from, I kept an eye out for tubular plastic. I used a 500-pound bomb from a Monogram 1/48th scale B-29 Superfortress; all I did was saw the fins off. It's slightly larger than the couplers and gives the third stage an appealingly chubby look.

The original kit decals failed in a weird way that I've never seen before: the ink was water-soluble, so that by the time the carrier had released from the paper and was ready to go onto the model, about seventy percent of the ink had washed off. I ruined enough of the decals finding this out that I threw them all away and grubbed around in my decal collection until I find a sheet from an old AMT 1/200th "Man in Space" set, which donated some of its Saturn V markings to the cause.

The paint is mostly of the hardware store variety. The yellow is "Marigold", while the white is plain old hardware store semigloss white, and the red is hardware store barn red. The black is Tamiya semigloss black lacquer, while the silver is Testors two-part lacquer, a color I believe is called "Plymouth Silver" or something like that. I'd go look, but last time I checked, there was a wasp buzzing around in the garage and knowing the exact paint color isn't worth risking getting stung.

By the way, I like the Testors two-part lacquers a lot. They spray nicely even out of a spray can, they cover well, they have a good semigloss sheen without the gloss sealer, and they are hard and durable once dry. I especially like them on natural metal aircraft models, where they are much tougher than Metalizer and dry much faster than Chrome Silver.