After a couple months of on-and-off work, I finally finished my P-38. I had bought a super old kit on Ebay and the decals were totally useless (Note to self: shell out for newer,better kits). No problem - I'll make my own decals. Spent some time in CorelDraw and bought some decal paper that you can run through a color injet printer and voila - my own specialized plane. But what to do?
I figured that I would make the Lightning that shot down Admiral Yamamoto (see story here) and definitely got more interested since there seemed to be a bit of a controversy. Go ahead read it it's pretty short. Anyway - the kit was such that I could make any number of variants...
So I did the best I could with the tools and skills I had available. Unfortunately reading the instructions was not one of those. I was just about done when Jim comes over to the house for Taco Night. He mentions (out of the blue) that back in the day he would turn in the same book report for school over and over - the book? "Get Yamamoto" The story of the mission to, well, you've already read the link above right?
So I say, I says "Well, you'll probably be interested in the model plane I'm building right now..." Reaching into cabinet of nerdishness
He says..."Wow, pretty nice...but...it can't be the plane that shot down Yamamoto since this is a P-38L and it was either a J or a G that flew the mission...
Whoa. That dude knows his planes.
Anyway, Spitfire Mk IX is next.
*Note: UofAPilot pointed out that Jim and Wikipedia were at odds - I fixed the quote to give Jim the benefit of the doubt. It was a Taco Night (read: lot of beer) so remembering conversations verbatim is a long shot.
