Scratch-built 1/72 American (Shelton) AG-4 Gyro Crusader

 

From the archive (2008):

The retro-futuristic look and curvaceous, graceful lines of the Shelton American Gyro Crusader whisper in your ear “streamlining” and “teardrop”.

To anyone familiar with the Bauhaus school of design it wouldn’t be a surprise if this one would have come up from their workshops, but it didn’t.

It is actually an American design –many of you already knew it- that had the misfortune of seeing the light of day in the post-depression hard years.

Nevertheless the only machine attracted a lot of publicity, the attention of the general public and some remarkable personalities, Amelia Earhart among them.

During its life the Crusader had some changes in its landing gear and props and also in the variety of images applied mainly to its nose. In some images its surfaces seem to appear without any inscriptions or images, though. A good reference is: Crusader: The Story of the Shelton Flying Wing by Alexander Roca.

The model required what I would like to politely describe as a somewhat complex engineering, although modelers not specially inclined to good manners could perhaps describe it as a darn freaking nightmare. The building process should be clear in the accompanying images.

For the finishing coat a metallic copper tone is described in the references. Stretching my dollars I acquired a variety of paints and began some testing, and ultimately decanted for Alclad II, by far the best. All the other known or arcane modeling paint brands presented a major or minor “metallic flake” effect perhaps more apt for Christmas decoration.

The white registrations presented a problem solved thanks to the intervention of fellow modeler Steve of the Merciless Lands of Arizona. I traded the decals for the recipe of “salsa golf”. I know, it’s a steal.

Besides the interior some external details were needed: a small collections of surface bumps on the engine/boom areas, some (6) mass balances erroneously depicted in all the 3vs I have seen, a Pitot tube, control cables running to horns on the elevator from the aft fuselage and wheels. The props were adapted Hamilton resin ones provided by Khee-Kha Art Productions (Thanks, Lars!).

A wide arrange of materials and techniques were used to build this model, including wood, vacuformed opaque and clear styrene, metal shapes and rods, resin parts and pizza.

This was not an easy one, and remained –incomplete- in the hangar (you know, the clamshell clear plastic food tray you took from the trash can when you assumed –wrongly- that your wife wasn’t looking) for a long time.

But all the tribulations are behind now that I can contemplate this dazzling metallic scarab gleaming in its unmistakable halo of charm, wrapped in the hazy mist of the glamorous 30’s.

Or so I like to dream.

Thanks to Mike Fletcher and (the late) Jon Noble for their help.