As a boy I built models. Ships, airplanes, some space craft. Never really liked car models. Mostly I built war planes. So of course that leads to fishing line, thumb tacks and the great battle for air superiority of my bedroom.
In the sky above my bed were
P-51 Mustang (natch) with D-Day stripes
P-38 again with the D-Day stripes
Spitfire (natch)
ME-109
FW-180
Corsair
B-17
B-25
(my B-29 stayed on the ground in a full diorama)
F-4 Phantom (horribly out of scale with the others)
F-111 (don’t know why I built this, I think because it had movable wings)
F-15
My Focke-Wulf had “smoke” trailing from the engine. (cotton ball streached out and coated with Final Net and painted various shades of grey)
IIRC, the…Hornet? Was launching a missile at the MiG (depicted by a sidewinder suspended on a length of fishing line between the two, trailing a line of paint-highlighted cotton balls), which had already taken a hit (the starboard engine, also denoted by a trail of cotton balls as “smoke” spewing behind, frozen in time) and was going down.
Edit: Almost forgot! At one time, at least, they were all swirling around an inflatable Pteranodon, the giant beast menacing the [del]bedroom[/del]countryside not unlike Rodan.
My brother had an encounter between a FW-180 and a Twin Mustang, which never happened IRL, and for which there were no kits, but my dad had bought two P-51’s and spliced them with balsawood spar wings.
I remember watching him painting the ME 262 and Mosquito and P-38, etc. leafy cammo on the upper sides and sky blue on the under, and asking “did that really fool anyone?”
Me, I had a Sopwith Camel and a Fokker Triplane dangling from 6lb fishing line (even then I was insisting that WWI was more significant than WWII)
I had the old Hawk Atomic Bomber hanging from my light fixture. Nothing else I can recall, though.
The Bomber had cool transparent orange flames coming out of its engines; many years later, I cast some copies in clear orange-tinted resin and used them on an aircar model I built.
From memory…
[ul]
[li]F4U Corsair[/li][li]P-51D Mustang[/li][li]F-14 Tomcat[/li][li]F-4 Phantoms (set of 4 in Thunderbirds paint)[/li][li]SR-71 Blackbird[/li][li]B-17 Flying Fortress[/li][li]B-25 Mitchell[/li][li]A-4 Skyhawk[/li][li]F-104 Starfighter[/li][li]T-65B X-Wing[/li][li]YT-1300 Freighter (Millenium Falcon)[/li][li]TIE Advanced X1 fighter[/li][li]Hughes 500 helicopter[/li][li]Space Shuttle Enterprise on its 747 carrier[/li][li]Lockheed L-1011 in Delta livery[/li][/ul]
With absolutely no thought to geographic or temporal cohesiveness, nor to common scale.
I was a compulsive airplane model builder in my younger days. Every Friday night meant a trip to the hobby store to get a couple of offerings from Airfix, Revell, Monogram and the like. I think I had over 100 at one point; here’s a picture of me and part of my collection.
Not as great a number as many of previous posters, but perhaps the most historically INaccurate.
[ol]
[li]Corsair[/li][li]B-29 Superfortress[/li][li]Sopwith Camel[/li][li]USS Enterprise (the original Star Trek version)[/li][li]X-Wing Fighter[/li][/ol]
I never intentionally put them in a dogfight scenario, but all my buddies gave me shit about it anyway.
B-24J Liberator
F-4 Phantom
F-86 Sabre
F-16 Fighting Falcon (with a squashed nose because I filled the nosecone with bb’s and model glue to get it to balance correctly on its gear, but all of the glue in its nose partially melted the nose cone, which drooped like some weird mecha-tapir)
A-1 Skyraider
A-7 Corsair (the ugliest of my models, even when weighed against the droop-nosed F-16)
P-51 Mustang
A6Mx Zero (I forget which variant)
Hawker Hurricane
Focke-Wulf 190
Messerschmidt BF-109E
P-61 Black Widow
ME-262 Schwalbe
There were probably others; that’s all I can recall for certain right now. My brother and I tried to keep them all to the same scale (1:48), and the ones we built had retractable gear, so we could display them gear up or down.
Oh yes! I had one of these too, which I’d fitted out as the fighter-bomber variant. Nearly all of mine were 1:72. (I also had an Airfix Saturn V which my brother-in-law built for me, and a sailing ship that was never anywhere near completed.) And I’ve just remembered a very poorly-built Boeing 727 and a Supermarine Attacker as a couple of my very early essays. Oh, and a Me410/U4.
Someone at school once brought in a “Blohm und Voss” which I tiresomely corrected to “Blohm und Voss BV 141b”. I don’t remember seeing the kit anywhere else or I’d have built one.
