FT Style B-25 Mitchell

                  This article is about my FT style B-25 Mitchell build. The B-25 is one of my favorites and I thought it would be fun to build one, but being my first scratch build it would be a challenge. I started the project around the 12th of april by first researching to see if anyone else had built one out of foam board before. Thankfully people had and made an article that really helped, but there where things that I wanted that was not on the others B-25. I also wanted to build mine to scale, so I used a not so healthy Revell 1/48 scale B-25 to get my measurements and switch them to 1/16 scale. 

1/16 sclae gave my B-25 a wingspan of 4.25 feet and a length of 3.25 feet. Unfortunately I dont have any pictures of the start of the build. After about a week I had the fuselage, wings, and tail section all assembled.

The next steps were the nacelles, after a lot of brainstorming I decided how to do it.I used the idea of a powerpod, then put circle on the powerpod cutting the tops of the back three until they were flush with the pod. For the firewall I cut a foam circle and a wood circle, then attachted those to the front of the powerpod and used a parkzone T-28/F-4u motor mount to hold my motor. I then used balsa wood stringers glued to the circles on the powerpod to get the shape of the nacelle. Ultracoat was then used to cover the nacelle. The back portion of the nacelle was tricking, but carved out of two peices of 3in. insulation foam with a wood file. As for the cowl, I was able to find a poster tube that fit perfectly over the 3in. diameter of the nacelle and carved out the front of the cowl with foam.

After putting the nacelles on the aircraft the B-25 was ready for flight. 

Not be the patient one I took the plane out as soon as the weather so allowed, but the first flight didn't go so well!

Now I had built a nose cone that would take the force of the crash, which it did, so the plane had minimum damage.

After letting the plane sit for a little bit I decided to fix it up and give it another go and the second went much better!

To finish the plane I painted the whole plane OD green except for the bottom which is painted grey.The guns are made From toothpicks and pink foam. The tailgunner was formed with thin plastic and printer paper to form the back. The guns in the back guns are covered with wax paper painted tan. Now my model being a gun nose it needed an appropriate amount of guns and a fun paint job, so I gave it both and I paint a portion of the naccelles black using semigloss black testors model paint. The paint job wasn't supposed to be accurate to ane specific b-25, but more for fun.

I am pretty proud of the finished product of my B-25J MItchell.