I'm a massive fan of Gerry Anderson productions; I grew up watching re-runs of Stingray, Thunderbirds, and Captain Scarlet (and saw Terrahawks when it was actually on). I think of all of them, Captain Scarlet had the most impact. Looking for a non-railway project to do, and with Gerry Anderson Day on the horizon, I thought I'd do some builds. I had some Airfix kits of the Angel Interceptors, but an online browse on eBay turned up...
...this. It was cheap, and I ordered it as a bit of a fun kit.
Some nice mouldings in the box.
Mix of parts; some in this chrome, some in a variety of coloured plastics.
The parts went together a bit oddly; some of them were very nice fits, others a bit vague.
One thing that became quickly apparent was that this wasn't really a model kit as much as it was a toy that came in kit form. It was crammed with working 'fun' accessories like these missile launchers.
What this meant was that the kit was loaded with fiddly bits to create working, overscale features.
I thought I'd try and do something that looked a little closer to the real model, so turned to one of my reference books (yep, I have a library of these sorts of books).
Adding the chromed plastic components.
The main working accessory turned out to be a working aircraft catapult.
This really was fiddly to assemble.
An interesting feature from the toy origins of the kit; a (now useless) battery compartment, and motor bay. Clearly this had wheels at some point in its life.
The plastic was a little flexible, and needed some clamping together.
The constructed toy. Close to accurate, but with overscale features.
The catapult worked, so well in fact I lost one of the three Angels not long after these pics were taken...
Painting-wise, I wasn't sure what to do with it. It was too much of a toy to pass muster as a model, but I thought I'd try and do something of a realistic paint job on it. In hindsight I wished I'd gone the whole-hog and rebuilt it without the overscale working features.
Photographing the model.
I'd had an idea to shoot some pics of the model out on location whilst we were on holiday in Wales for Easter (giving me about two weeks before Gerry Anderson Day), but bad weather really scuppered my plans.
By the end of the holiday I had a day or so left to shoot some pics; Storm Kathleen was hammering Snowdonia, and this -one of my regular holiday spots- was about as high an altitude as I felt like going in 60mph winds.
Not long after shooting this pic, the model blew over; I caught it about three inches off the rocks.
The tripod was rather too obvious a support, but the original, more light-weight option to hold it up was too fragile for the wind. More on the Angel Jet in a separate post.
The solution was an indoor shoot, after getting back to Yorkshire.
Again, more on this shoot in a separate post.
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