Whew!

I've got four kits on the bench right now that had mostly been waiting for Tamiya to start shipping paint again. Joy of joys, my LHS just got some in and I will be starting up again. Maybe I can get at least one thing done for CanAmCon this year.

A good friend gifted me with Revell's 1/72 B-17! Wow! What a guy, huh?

When things got frustrating last week with my conversion of a Fairey Rotodyne into a gunship, I put that aside and opened up the B-17. I promised not so much AMS this time and dove in. Here's the thought process:

"Wow, pretty nice kit. Hmm. I think I'll OH MY GOD WHAT HAVE I GOTTEN MYSELF INTO?"

It's a big kit. While waiting for the oil paint woodwork to dry (yes, there was a lot of wood on a B-17), I thought about display and came up with a little diorama idea. For that idea, I needed bicycles.

I searched online and found that the bikes were expensive and not that good. I then found a vintage Airfix WW2 German soldier on a bike and thought I could cut away the figure. No dice.

The only thing left to do was build one. I grabbed some sprue and started stretching. My first bike turned out okay, but the lines were wrong so I hit the internet to find a pic of a 1930's Raleigh. I took this pic, scaled it down to 1/72, traced the fame, tires and fenders in illustrator and made a template:



I laid out the frame and glued it. I made a coil of copper wire on an Xacto handle to make the wheels (the handle's diameter was nearly perfect for a scale 26"). The fenders were rolled styrene sheet.



Here's the difference between the templated (in tweezers) and the non-templated bikes.



I then made a second templated bike just for fun. Here's the trio painted:



And here's a close up of a tempalted bike:



Not bad. We'll see how the B-17 itself turns out!