RarePlanes 1/72 Vacuformed Seversky P-35 converted to racer

Hi all
Gordon Stevens' RarePlanes Bell Airacuda generated a record traffic on the blog.
In response to that surge of interest I am re-posting here an article on another of Gordon's nice kits I published on ARCAIR in Jan 2008, without re-writing it of modifying it. I hope you enjoy this one too.


Note: at that time I was starting to make my own decals. The text implies laser home-made decals are better, which is not really true. Nowadays I make all my decals on an inkjet printer.

"Vaculand is a not that far away region that is located right after Plasticland. It limits to the East with Resinland, near the mostly unknown regions of Scratchland, were the Glue River and the Spring of Cyanoacrylate cross into Styrene Territory.

Carried on the wings of Methylene and Terpene, the Greek muses of modeling, I arrived to those strange lands where I found this RarePlane’s kit of a –soon to be transformed- Seversky P-35.

It is a simple vacuformed model, easy to grasp and with a pleasant styrene sheet gage. You get the idea, not a flimsy please-don’t-glue-me kit, neither a please-grab-the-chain-saw one. As with most vacs, you have to ride the spares box or learn something for heaven’s sake and fabricate your own missing bits. Aeroclub Models and other companies also have accessories that you can buy for a modest stipend.

I gathered my references, but this time I read them before building the model, which resulted to be the right thing to do. I received help from Jim Schubert, a.k.a. the Modeling Santa Claus and from other good fellows at the Wings of Peace forum.

OK then: panel lines all over –well, admitedly, I skipped some-, interior bits, engine donor, prop donor, mods in the due places, Jim’s wheels, a bit more there, a bit less here and there it is, a Seversky AP-7 as flown by Jackie Cochran in the 1938 Bendix race. Or is it? Oh, drat, the decals! Out with some images that Modeling Santa provided and the inkjet printer. A few coats of varnish and voila!: A total mess. If you apply too little varnish the ink dissolves in the water; if you apply too much you end up with material suitable for transparent roofing in you house. Plan B: laser printer. This time it went much better and after a careful positioning of the many images and some decal strips for the canopy framing I was able to sit down and contemplate the chrome blender-like lines of this graceful racer.

The stance says it all, isn’t it?"