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aircrafts .::. ships .::. miscellaneous .::. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
Well, there isn't much to say. This is an out of the box build of the 1/144 scale Boeing Stratocruiser from Minicraft.
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I know it never existed, but I built one anyway. A Swedish Boeing 377 Stratocruiser!
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I bought a stack of papers on the planned purchase of Boeing Stratocruiser of SILA . It contained propeller data, flight costs, range performance, tables for take-off and landing and such. The most important thing for me was a drawing of the plane in SILA colours. I’ve seen models of the Stratocruiser in SAS livery but never in this one, so I had to build one. At an article in The Atchison Daily Globe, February 28 – 1946, SILA confermed orderering four aircrafts and they talk about a Swedish Modern interior decoration scheme, styled by leading designers Stockholm. They would have been delivered in 1947, but like the Boeing Dreamliner there were delays. In February 1949 SAS (as SILA was now a part of) transferred the contract on their ordered Stratocruisers to British BOAC who got the plane in December. |
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There is a kit in 1/72 from Academy and in 1/144 from Minicraft. As it never existed in these colours and is a rather big plane, I went for the smaller model. I always thought that the engines are little to simplified even for this scale, so I invested in new resin engines. |
| The fit was not perfect, so it was some boring work to get them to sit right. If i just had slipped them in place they would have been pointing upwards.. |
| I misjudged how much weight was needed in the nose, so I got a plan that imitates a dog that sits beautiful. I had no desire to make a hole for inserting more weights, and the nose wheel felt too fragile to glue it on a base plate. I saw a picture of a gorgeous passenger stair standing beside a DC-4 so I built one of those with the help of photos. It keeps the plane from falling backwords.. |
| With the help of the drawing I made some decals for the model. I changed the registration for one that was reserved for the planes. The Stratocruiser had some different window arrangements depending on the client ordering them so I had to locate photos of BOAC planes to see how the windows were located on this machine. |
| Blue is not my favourite colour and it’s very rare that I get inspired to build a blue scheme so it is sad that both ABA and SAS use blue on their planes, but I must say that the blue on silver look classy. |
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I will never understand the relationship between ABA and SILA. They used the same livery on the planes and basically the same logo. I made a base for the plane using this logo. I went to the art shop and bought a round canvas panel that I painted blue. I cut out the logo from silver coloured cardboard and glued it to the canvas. It looks rather nice but isn't really the best base for an airplane. |
| Stockholm March 31, 2006 |  |
Updated August 20, 2018 |
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