Lindberg Snark

My stab at the 1/48th scale Lindberg Snark. I built this for the most part while I was waiting to start radiation therapy on the tumors in my groin - my had had swollen up to near-uselessness and it was pleasant to sit on the bed with a towel on my lap working on this model.

It's big. Surprisingly big. It'll eat up a lot of storage space, so be prepared.

While I was by and large pleased with the kit, it had a few flaws that required work. The flat top of the fuselage, especially between the wings, featured a large step, as one of the fuselage halves had developed a strong inward warp. I cut about fifty lengths of sprue anywhere from a quarter to a half an inch in length and glued them inside the fuselage so they would force the warp out when the fuselage was glued together. It worked for the most part - it eliminated about 90% of the step. The rear fuselage is supposed to be removable so show off the jet engine, but this left sizeable gaps, so I glued the rear fuselage on.

Then came putty. Lots and lots of putty. Most of the seams required filler and sanding; all required sanding. The rudder didn't fit well at all, so I covered it with putty and sanded it flat, preferring no hinge line at all than the Grand Canyon of hinge lines the kit came equipped with. It took me about six prime-sand-fill-prime cycles to get the seams acceptably flat and smooth, and in the process I destroyed a good deal of raised surface detail, but I was prepared to live with it and made no effort to restore any of it. I just don't enjoy scribing panel lines. At all.

After all this fitting, filling and sanding I sprayed the whole thing with Tamiya Italian Red spray lacquer, which I thought worked well - it's much brighter than the red I normally use, and I liked the subtle fluorescent nature of the paint.

Decaling the beast was a trip, in that the instructions don't show you where any of the decals go. All you can do is guess from the box photos where things go. Once you understand the scheme it makes sense and isn't impossible to figure out, but it might throw some people. On the plus side, the decals themselves were pretty good. I broke a few, but mostly through mishandling; the decals themselves were thin and sturdy and settled well with a few treatments of Micro-Sol. You may note that I applied the fuselage-side star-and-bar insignia parallel to the white stripe and not canted so they're sitting level while the Snark is on the launcher. It's incorrect and ahistorical, but I think it looks better this way, and it's my model, dang it.

The launcher, work stand and tractor were pretty easy to assemble. The workstand looked like it was going to be trouble, but it went surprisingly well, and the launcher was quite straightforward. The tires and tracks, however, were tough. I couldn't seem to find any way to sand the prominent seam out of the vinyl tires, and ended up carving it off with a single-edged razor blade. Most of the tires are hidden by blast shields, but enough of them are out in the open that I decided not to weather them and thus call attention to their hand-carved nature. The tracks were impossible to join together, but it turned out to be irrelevant. The gap between the return rollers and the fenders was so tight it was possible to jam the two ends together and trap them atop a return roller without glue.

A final note. Somehow I lost the nose boom, so I replaced it with a piece of round toothpick, sanded smooth and painted silver.

So, it was a lot of work, heavy on the sanding, filling and tire-carving, but it's such an unusual model I really didn't mind the work. I may build another one in a more restrained grey SAC color scheme, but then again, I may not.

I haven't painted any of the crew figures yet (though I'm going to) so I can't comment on the quality of the figures.