Merlin Models 1/72 Lockheed Air Express completed

Know exactly what these Merlin kits are: an attempt of Kaos to disrupt the modeling world, to sow utter confusion among unsuspected modelers, to drive Control mad trying to build unbuildable, amorphous lumps of plastic in a vain, futile effort to obtain a model!

This "kit" should be a prominent character in one of Poe's or Nathaniel Hawthorne's scary stories, or be in one of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu myths...

Oh, the horror...

If you have the strength of heart, and can bear it, you may consult the step-by-step Modeling Noire genre story here:

https://wingsofintent.blogspot.com/2018/08/merlin-models-lockheed-air-express-dark.html

Yes, after all that time and inordinate amount of painstaking effort, a not totally indecent model was produced. Was it worth it?

Get yourself a Planet Lockheed Air Express (I did after this!) and trash this miserable lump of Merlin plastic if it happened to have sneakily crawled into your stash. Or donate it to a Museum of Horrors, to be displayed aside (or better in) the torture chamber.

Or wait, if you don't like resin kits or their prices are not for your modeling pocket, until a manufacturer produces these Golden Age beauties in styrene form.

One very good thing came of it, though: I commissioned the decal sheet from Arctic Decals (the kit decal sheet was as miserable -and wrong- as the plastic), and it is superb, of exquisite quality.

So I now have spare decals for my other Air Express, yippee!

I represented the plane as flown by Frank Hawks in the 1929 National Air Tour, as a pathfinder plane for the entrants.

Once again I reiterate that this plane went through a large number of modifications in details and marks (some listed on the building post), so be careful, if you attempt to model it, with your research, and base it not on drawings, but on photos.