Oldbaldguy

By pure luck I found said video once again while trying to satisfy my curiosity. (Not the best vid, so I wouldn’t waste my time looking for it.). The guys are in orange bags and it looks like it may be the first flight or at least very early. Early seats - no pods. The B/N climbs in on the right side, faces aft, appears to sit down and starts fiddling with a canopy gizmo back at the hinge point. You can’t see the seat very well if at all, but I assume it is where it is supposed to be. If nothing else, it appears there is enough room in the middle cockpit to maneuver a bit, at least on that airframe.

This is going to be nice. Crossed paths with several Cutlasses when I was very young. My dad was in VA-12 when they were equipped with them and when we were transferred to NAS Oceana, there were at least three derelict F7Us sitting around on the base or in the nearby boneyard. Played in all of them until they finally disappeared and not a single one was painted. All were in natural metal finish, just like Vought intended. Glad to see that you plan to uphold the tradition.

That’s a pretty wonky looking canopy in their ad art. I’m not sure even you could fix that.

Absolutely sixth letter of the alphabet-ing gorgeous!!

So what’s a Venow? Nice box art, however.

Looks like you are already committed to a complete repaint, etc. Surface prep, surface prep, surface prep!! Our typical model airplane paint ain’t gonna do it for something this big nor will an airbrush of the kinds we use do the job - you are in the professional painter arena with this thing. If you plan to paint it yourself, I’d recommend you do it one section at a time and not try to hose down the entire model in a single session. It’s just too big. It is gorgeous, however. Would love to see how it turns out.

Very nice. That’s a lot of real estate for an airbrush newbie. Looks like you did very well.

Most of you all already know this but it bears repeating. The American actor Jimmy Stewart was an Air Force pilot with combat experience and a brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve until he finally retired. During one of his Reserve tours he ended up in the front seat of a TB-58 at Carswell (I think) with an experienced command pilot behind him telling him what to do. They cobbed the throttles at the end of the runway and flew a typical maintenance check flight profile - charge down the runway, suck up the gear and haul back on the stick til you go blind, etc. As they rocketed up in a steep climb on four! J-79s in full burner, legend says that at some point just after wheels-up, the normally laconic General Stewart exclaimed (using your best Jimmy Stewart accent) something to the effect of, “Jeezus Christ! This is not an aeroplane. It’s a godammed rocket ship!!!” I’d buy an over priced 1/48 Monogram kit on that endorsement alone. I never had the opportunity to talk with General Stewart but I did speak with his wife. She was most gracious and told me the general, as much as he would like to, was indisposed and could not accept my invitation. Close enough; I’ll take it. Happy to stand in the shadow of greatness.

The Air Force had a low level route through the hills and hollers where my grandparents lived. It was very common to see Buffs and Hustlers down in the weeds. My grandfather called B-58s “Bushhogs” because to him they were shaped like the mower farmers towed behind tractors when clearing fields for planting. Seeing one was as much luck as anything because the sound was always way, way behind them.

I am senior enough to have seen operational B-58s both in the air and on the ground. Last time was 1968. Still, I know next to nothing about them other than they did what they did and it took three guys to do it. Watched a promotional video the other day and was astounded when it appeared to me that the guy in the middle climbed aboard and sat down facing aft. Whether he later turned around in his cockpit and faced front, I don’t know. Maybe he was prepping his seat before strapping in? I watched that bit two or three times and it looked the same each time but I just can’t imagine that being the case. So does anyone know if I actually saw what I think I saw?

Coolest prop fighter ever. This should be grand.

Besides, that conversion is in puny 1/48.

After watching this thing come together, I swear I think somebody said, “Hey, grab an engine pod off that KB-50 over there and let’s strap a seat to it and see if we can get it to fly.” Impressive bit of modeling here. I had my doubts to begin with, but this is turning out to be about the coolest thing ever.

Oooo! These turned out nice! Note the two Colt .45s that are part of the squadron insignia. Heavy 7 was called The Peacemakers, same as the revolver.

Not sure the thing with McDonnell - Douglas was a merger. Looked like an acquisition to me. If you buy up your competition, then pretty soon you don’t have any and can do whatever you want.

Just for the record, the Navy gray over white scheme was flat (or eggshell, depending on how fresh it was) light gull gray over glossy white, as everyone knows. The white was glossy to better reflect heat from nukes going off all around them as they pressed toward their targets. The idea was to limit flash burn-thru of thin skins. That never explained the continued use of dark national insignia and other heat absorbing markings, however. Heavy 7’s tail stripe was regular medium blue and not the light blue you see on the decal sheet and the stripe eventually continued down the trailing edge of the vertical stab to emulate the number 7 and had 13 stars. The GL tail code came from parent unit Heavy Attack Wing One. All HATWING 1 squadrons had their own tail code - Heavy 3 was GJ, Heavy 5 was GK, Heavy 7 was GL, Heavy 9 was GM, etc. When the squadron was permanently assigned to an air wing as a unit (and not on board as a det), the GX code shifted to the Air Wing code while on the ship. Depending on which cruise (Both were on the Enterprise) Heavy 7s A5As carried either AE or AF tail codes. The only other squadron to take A5As to the boat for a cruise was Heavy 1, tail code AG, on the Independence.

Of course there is yet another option. One of my military instructors in college said exactly one thing that I’ve always remembered. He said that once he cracked the cover, he read any book to the very end no matter how bad it was. Why? Because somebody went to considerable trouble to write it, something he had never done, so he felt like he owed it to them for their effort. HKM went to all that trouble to make a frikkin’ Mosquito kit for us so why not build it?? No kit is perfect but how many people know that? Consider it a challenge. Break out the glue. Do what you want. The world hangs in the balance of headier stuff than a nanometer error on a model kit.

This model is really something special, but why so many “On” buttons on the bottom?

I think the cast of BoB did a much better job of it than any all-American cast could ever have. To this day, it’s very hard for me to accept Damion Lewis as anyone but Winters. And then there is Helen Mirren’s Irish character in 1923. Epic stuff, that. Pretty cool how really good actors can so easily learn another language - like English and English or vice versa.

My wife and I watched Broadchurch a while ago. Had nae idea wha David Tennant sed for ha’ the show.

Maybe less Foghorn and more his dog Beauregard. As you well know, there is Hollywood Southern and real Southern. The closest Hollywood ever came to real Southern, I think, was Fred Gwynne as Judge Haller in My Cousin Vinny: “Two whuts? You said ‘Two yoots.’ “

And then there are the volumes one can speak using variations on just one or two curse words. And we haven’t even scratched the surface of military-speak. This thread may be bottomless.

The American Southland is a wonderful place. In the days before the most recent yankee invasion (wherein you are as likely to see a car tag/number plate from Manitoba as Mississippi), we found ourselves in either of two camps: We spoke what I self-categorize as Wiregrass Southern or we spoke the warm, gentle, flowing language of well-to-do Southerners. There once was a lot of both here and I have experienced both sides of the track. Still do. South Carolina Southern is different from South Georgia Southern, for example, just as Upstate Carolinian is distinguishable from whatever they speak on the coast of South Carolina and the list goes on. What I have found over the years is that the differences rise up from the dirt - it is a geography thing and not a country of origin or DNA thing, which fascinates me. My mother in law was a fluent wiregrass speaker who could butcher the spoken word like no one else. Born and bred in Middle Georgia, she lived in May-retta (Marietta), worked at the Bell Bummer Plant (Bell Bomber Plant) during WW2, and drank Cocoalers (Coca Cola). Her best friend was May-ree (Mary), my wife Elaine was Eeee-lane and it took her most of the day to say her son’s name, Howard. She was famous for much more, some of which could curdle milk, but you get the idea. Born, raised and educated in the same neck of the woods as my mother in law and working maybe 15 minutes away at the time was a lovely dark-haired woman with the most beautiful, warm, deep, rich, smooth Southern accent I have ever heard. Ever. Listening to her was bourbon for my ears. I would have been happy to sit for hours just to hear her read the telephone book. She was first generation Lebanese-American, so go figure. So, there you have it. Be sure to tell everyone I said hey and y’all come back now, hear? And stay away from that moonshine cause it’ll make you smack your mammy. Oh, and watch out for them deer!

The English language is a remarkable piece of kit. It is structured, adaptive and evolving all at the same time. Because we are truly a nation of immigrants and always have been, American English is the most transformational English of all. We can Americanize anything from any language and put it into common use without a second thought, but we also are a bit lazy when it comes to the rules of the road. Linguistic shortcuts are a way of life with us, even if they sometimes make us sound as dumb as a box of rocks. For example, several years ago I watched a YouTube video of an English television personality who, as she was nearing retirement, found herself in the back seat of a Tornado on an orientation flight. She was small and could barely see over the canopy sill but was a professional to the very end. As they were ripping along some river just after takeoff, she peeked over the edge and said, “Oh. I see we are flying quite lowly, aren’t we?” I was stunned. It was definitely pucker time for this lady, but her message was understated and her grammar unimpeachable. Had she been an American in that same situation, her response would have been a string of squeals, expletives, hyperbole and incomplete sentences. In either case, English being what it is, we would have understood the message but the mechanisms to get us to shared understanding would have been as dissimilar as football and football, if you know what I mean.

It is without question ZEE. Who in the world would build a GeeBee Zed??