When Kits Attack

There are two items of interest regarding this 1/48th scale Monogram F-101 Voodoo. The first is that it's the first model I built after my chemotherapy treatments ended. My skills, as it turned out, had atrophied at least as much as my muscles had, but it didn't turn out too terribly badly - though the bright silver on the exhausts still bugs me, and whatever color I painted it, it isn't Air Defense Command grey.

But mostly, I show the F-101 to highlight the fact that isn't the subject of this post, which is the Airfix 1/72nd scale Boulton-Paul Defiant.

I'm bad at remembering anniversaries, and though I fully intended to build a couple of RAF models to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, I forgot. As it turns out, I didn't even have a Spitfire I and a Hurricane II in my collection, and kept forgetting to buy any. (I have Bf 109E, but it seems somehow wrong to honor the RAF by building a model of a Bf 109.)

But I did have an Airfix Boulton-Paul Defiant, and the Defiant did fight in the Battle of Britain, and the Defiant is just odd enough to be cool. And I decided to build it.

That was my first mistake. I build a lot of Airfix kits and I generally know what I'm in for, but the Defiant was pretty bad. I think my model is about 80% Squadron putty by weight. I worked on it on and off for two months, trapped in the endless cycle of filling, sanding, priming, re-filling, re-sanding, re-priming... Time passed. Continents moved. Other kits came and went, and still the Defiant was covered with putty. Finally I decided to just move on for the sake of sanity, and painted it with my dwindling stock of Humbrol dark green and dark earth. Then came the decals.

They didn't just break, or fall apart, or fracture. They exploded. Violently. And because I am by nature inclined to experiment with the most important decal first (the fuselage codes, in this case), I couldn't easily recover. But the decal sheet had markings for a black night fighter version. I hastily repainted it flat black, overcoated the decals with decal film, and tried again. The decals didn't explode, but they wouldn't stick. At one point I blew lightly on the model to dislodge a bit of fluff, and a roundel peeled off the wing and simply fluttered away.

Grumble.

In the meantime, I broke off the tail wheel, broke off at least two of the .303 machine guns, broke a propeller blade trying to make something vaguely propeller-shaped out of the mass of flash, and completely failed to find a way to erase the glaringly obvious ejector pin mark inside the canopy.

So now what? I don't know. I should just throw it away. I've thrown better models away, after all. I botched the assembly of an Italeri Me 410, and threw it in the trash without much complaint. But somehow I just can't trash the Defiant, even though it richly deserves to be buried deeply and quickly in a landfill. I did a quick search of the Squadron Shop and couldn't come up with aftermarket decals for a Defiant, but I did have decals from the old Airfix Westland Whirlwind in my decal box. I'm tempted to apply them just to get the model off top dead center, and then hang the finished model from the ceiling of my garage like the F-101 above, the true home of the crappy model.