Well here is it, the dreaded Maquette (Frog) B-17E.

I couldn't pass the kit up, after finding it on the Internet for 9 bucks. I was searching for a B-17E after reading a story about the roll of the B17's in the Battle of Midway Atoll.

Then shortly after the purchase of this kit, the "Back to the Box Challenge" was posted on the ARC discussion board. This kit sounded as a perfect candidate for that build.

The building of the kit went OK, the fit of the wings to the fuselage was pretty ugly. I applied model cement heavily to that area, then cut the dried excess down & filed/sanded it smooth.

There is no molded detail to the landing gear, wheels & tires.

The 2 small upper windows that go between the cockpit & nose were missing, so I filled the spaces in with Elmers Glue.

Click on images below to see larger images

I was also missing one of the shafts for the props. So I used my tap & die for my HO scale Kadee Couplers on the prop & ran a plastic bolt through the engine into the threaded prop.

I masked the cockpit windows using Elmers Glue.

The entire model was hand painted, using Model Masters Dark Green, Dark Ghost Gray & Accupaint Stencil Black.

The brush strokes are there, the camera just doesn't pick em up.

The blue insignia decals that were included were a baby blue. Even for this build, there was no way I could make myself apply them. So I used a set of decals from a 1/48 Wildcat for the wings and a set of decals from a 1/72 Academy Hellcat for the fuselage.