1/72 ARK Vultee Vengeance Build

Making Models Like It's 1970!

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Sometimes Nostalgia Has A Flip Side...

One of my main workbench projects at the moment is my build of a 'classic vintage' 1/72 scale ARK Vultee Vengeance. This kit is a re-release by the Russian company Ark of a release that was formally done by the company NOVA which - in turn - was a re-release of an original kit which was done by the infamous FROG company.

[Note: Actually, if you go to the Scalemates page for this model you will see that several other model companies have re-released this moulding at one time or another, but the current ARK boxing highlights just these three most memorable outings - FROG, NOVA and ARK.]

Now, the reason I bought this 'vintage' kit was from sheer nostalgia as it is one of the very first plastic scale model kits that I can remember making as a boy (the very first being Airfix's DH Comet). As a lad making kits in teh late 1960s and early 1970s you had just three options available to you here in the UK - for kit makers - Airfix, Revell and then there was FROG.

FROG was very much at the bottom of the pile when it came to military aircraft model making, where possible you bought Airfix or Revell, but the one thing going for FROG was that it had a few aircraft kits that were not done by the other two big companies. [I do seem to recall seeing kits by AURORA in Woolworths in the 1970s but these were to expensive for my pocket money at the time - but I did manage to buy their Glow In The Dark Frankenstein on one special occasion. The really big change came in the mid-70s when Matchbox kits began to appear in my local store. But I digress.]

So when I saw this ARK re-release of the Vultee Vengeance dive bomber I could not resist the temptation to buy it, just to recapture some of the old joy of making a plastic model from my childhood. But as it turned out, things aren't always as you remember... (Foreshadowing!)

A Good Kit To Experiment On...

This kit lay on my stash shelf for some time but then came what seemed like a good opportunity to finally dust it off and give it a go. I bought myself a new airbrush kit and needed a fairly uncomplicated kit with a fairly large and uncluttered surface area to try the airbrush out. Now while the Vengeance is in 1/72 it is a fairly chunky kit and it has a reasonably sized fuselage and nice bit wings that are ideal for trying out a simple camouflage scheme using my new airbrush. So off I went...

But then I started to get reminders about why we had such a low opinion of FROG kits back in the day! 😕

The first little hiccup was not unexpected and that was the very sparce level of detail, but then we had a lot lower expectations when it came to authenticity and accuracy back in the 1960s (boy, just look at some of Airfix's 'vintage classic' kits)! The Vengeance's cockpit was - put kindly - 'minimalist'. 😂

Above: Yep, that's all there is to the cockpit (the machine gun is a bit of a dog's dinner as well). At the time I guess that young kids would not be concerned about details that would be mostly hidden when the model was assembled. But as we know, adult model makers obsess about ALL detail even if it is hidden (we know it's there)!

But I cracked on, and then came the engine section... Oh dear. This had two issues with assembly, the first being that the instructional diagram was *incorrect* (showing one of the parts back to front) and then the engine firewall piece was badly moulded and had a attachment point completely missing. 😠

Above: This mistake in ARK's instructions (I don't know whether this was originally a mistake by FROG) caused me a lot of consternation, especially as one of the attachment tabs was also missing (moulding fault)! I could not get this to fit correctly into the engine cowling and had to resort to watching other peoples' builds of this model and only then realised the instruction faux pas!!!

Above: Screenshot from someone else's build - the part the RIGHT way round!

Still, I figured this out and it was a simple fix to build and glue on a new piece so that the firewall fitted (and I use the term 'fit' - like the part itself ' very loosely).

I started to have a bad feeling about this kit and sure enough this was just the start of minor niggles that reminded me about why scale model making could be a little frustrating at times when I was a lad...

The next irritation was more of a technicality rather than an omission or fault, and did - I admit - make me chuckle a bit. You see, to attach the wheels onto the undercarriage FROG (the original kit designer) chose to go with a attachment method that was fairly common in the 1960s but would cause great consternation in later years. To fix the wheels in place - and yet allow them to revolve - FROG used the old fashioned hot knife method rather than a two piece axel and hub method.

You literally heated a blade up using a lighter until it glowed red and then melted the axel - like a mushroom - so that it captured the wheel in place. Today's Health & Safety officers would be aghast and there would probably be some sort of public campaign to ban this 'dangerous toy' from the market! 😂

Above: Kit assembly the old school way! You wouldn't get away with this nowadays!

For me, I found it rather comical and a little nostalgic to be doing one of these old fashioned model making tricks (like the other one where if you wanted to make a tank's aerial you would use a lighter to melt a piece of plastic sprue and then stretch it to form a thin thread of plastic).

These days we kinda expect the model manufacturer to include an appropriately modelled part or there to be a third-party accessory part to be available - 'real' modelling is kind of a thing of the past unless you are a dedicated 'scratch builder'. In a way, making models these days is a little too easy.

Conclusion

Well, the kit assembly is still underway - as I have several jobs on the go at the same time - but each new assembly stage seems to highlight 'issues' that are only 'issues' now because they were the norm back in the day. Things like ill-fitting parts, or instructions that left out important details and you had to come up with your own solutions or detailing that is so vague that it make you wince (I chuckled at the two crew figures which were only just human shaped)... 😆

Notes on improving the ex-FROG Vengeance: This is an aside and NOT what I want to do, but my brother - Ian - was talking to me about the quality of the FROG/ARK Vengeance and I did ponder what you could do to improve it if you were so inclined (as I said, I am not inclined)! …Obviously scratch building and adding a lot of small detail - especially in the cockpit - would improve the look of the model, but one of the biggest things I think you might do is scribing the model’s panel lines. I kinda dabbled in doing this with the small amount of scribing that I did on the engine cowling. I was quite pleased with how this turned out and it did make that part look better - so, you could go on to scribe ALL of the aircraft’s raised (but faint) panel lines. I noted that the other build of this model I watched on YouTube included this improvement.

Above: My scribing knife kit, including handle, selection of blade sizes and a roll of DYMO label tape which is great for making guides for your cutting.

Above: Example of one of the scribing blades, these are kind of a 'reverse chisel' rather than a knife. You use these to score a line into the plastic.

So, I'm ploughing on regardless and simply acknowledging that this kit is what it is - old.

It's come together and to be fair it will fulfill exactly what I want it to, that being a simple guineapig for my airbrushing practise. I'm not precious about it and expect it to be relatively sub-par quality wise. But there again it was a very cheap model in the first place!

We shall see. (To be continued.)