Small Scale Military Headquarters

Hello All, haven't posted in a long time but have been following along. My son and I have been trying our hand at making some homemade decals for some 1/144th B-24's of the 90th Bomb Group "JOLLY ROGERS". I thought I would post just a few of the planes. The first pic is "Queen of Hearts" from the 320th Sqd. This is the aircraft my father was in as top turret gunner. The second plane is "Booby Trap" from the 321st Sqd. We made the nose art and tail markings for both aircraft.

Excellent work, looks great !!

Very nice. Where did you find 1/144 pinups for the nose art decals

My son, besides also being a modeler is a Graphic Design artist. We grabbed some actual shots of the real planes some pics of nose art here and there and ended up with these.

I don't usually say things are totally awesome but that looks totally awesome!

I must confess my ignorance concerning 1/144th scale, where can you buy these?

Over the last several years there has been a great number of 1/144th planes out of Japan. Most are prepainted, semi assembled resin type of plastic. From WWI to the present. These B-24's were from a company called CafeReo in their BigBird series. The series included 2 olive drab B-24's and 3 Japanese Bettys. They come prepainted with some tampo markings and semi assembled. I had to remove the preapplied markings to add our own. I'll add some pics of some other planes. "Cocktail Hour" is from the series and comes with the nose art decal. The olive drab Jolly Rogers has decals from an old rare Minicraft decal sheet, and "Queen Mae" has decals from a company named MYK Design decals.

Great to see you back JollyRoger.

Remember well your post about your dads plane "Queen of Hearts", and took great pleasure in tracking down some pics of the actual aircraft.










Really fantastic to see you, and your son doing some famous B-24's from your dads squadron, Jolly Rogers. A labour of love, I am sure.

They look awesome, and think you have both done a great job on these, particularly as they are 1/144.

I have "Booby Trap" in 1/72, done by Corgi.

Quick question. The Corgi "Booby Trap" has a much more blue to the tail with the skull and cross bones. Yours is very green. Which would be correct?

http://www.flyingmule.com/products/CG-AA34006


Again, great to see you post again, with this great project and update.

You should be very proud.

Thanks for the info on the decals. The CafeReo planes look good the way you improved them. I have several Big Birds waiting for me to find time and space, but I am not sure my eyes are good enough and hands steady enough to work with 1/144 decals

Thanks all for the positive responses. Snake, to try to answer your question about the tail color. Its hard to decipher the true shade of the colors because there just are not any color pictures that we know of. I have seen some original 321st squadron patches and they are a darker shade than my model but a lighter shade than the Corgi. We have all the original Jolly Rogers group books and squadron books. We went with the color on the cover of the 321st group book seeing it was printed in 1944. I am assuming it was enhanced by the books printer seeing that all 4 group books are exactly the same except for the tail colors on the covers. Another situation we ran into was the color of the inside of the shark’s teeth. Of the 4 squadrons the 320th were the only B-24s in the group to have the teeth. Now since I was a kid all the models I saw had red in the sharks mouth. After months of researching my son and I found that there were at least 3 different styles of shark’s teeth. We think the olive drab aircraft had red painted in the mouth. The later natural metal ones had blue in the mouth with a red border. This we figured by studying many black and white pics and comparing the different shades of the tails to the sharks mouth. Posted is a pic of the 321st squadron book to show the color we used.

Just to give an idea of how much the 1/144th line has exploded here are some pics of a show case we have. You can see the B-24's in the background.All are 1/144 except the small group of Hallmark ornaments. This is not all we have there are some in some smaller cases. See how many different ones you can spot. There are a few Corgi's, IXO's and 21st Century. Most are Cafereo and F-toys and Bandai Wing Club. The Goose is one I repainted and the diorama of the B-25 engine change was made by my son. It is a Revell kit with all the goodies scratch built.