R is for Radiobird is No-Go!

I know, I'll get me coat, but not before I've blurbed this up! These have - with the exception of the evilBay image - been in Picasa since 2011, when I ran out of steam halfway through a project which hasn't gone any further, but they need to go, so they may give someone else an idea, and we can always return to it of I ever have the time and space to finish it off!

 

The KY-branded novelty USAF Rocket Radio out of Hong Kong is not actually particularly rare (there are about four on feeBay today, including two, boxed and working), and would have been the sort of thing piled high in the old electrical shops or Woolworth's when I were't lad!

I picked up a non-working, severely sun-discoloured one at Sandown Park in the March of 2011, and set out to 'do something' with it, and I wasn't sure (still 'aint!) whether that would be scratch-build a more accurate Thunderbird 1, it being the basis of the knock-off, or produce something less like the original, and, perhaps, more sci-fi/pulp'y.

 

To which end I stripped out the dead radio, wiring, battery componants and et cetera, removed all the stickers and filed-off all the paint with a very-fine, flat-profile, steel, rat-tailed file.

I then glued everything together, filled the screw-holes, and sanded, fettled, filled, de-seamed and smoothed everything until it was a single piece. The two dial/button holes hadn't been done when these shots were taken and would have been part of the next phases shots!

 

The swing-wings being non-functional, there was no need for a continued gap between the two fuselage halves, while once the battery compartment had been emptied the nose-cone could be glued-on, and filled clean and neat!

 

I also still had to remove the two raised chevron lines on the wings. And the chrome was lifted with neat TFR (traffic film remover). At which point it all ground to a halt for reasons which never got explained here, by order of the tribunal judge, such are the nature of NDA's, but I won, sort of!

 

However, it's still around, somewhere in the stash, and the question remains, do I try to reproduce the eight winglets, by making a single moulding (jet fighter tail plane or wing tip from the spares zone?), casting eight identical copies and trying to line them all up nicely to get a half-decent T1, or do I somehow remove the four silly boxes and fill in the holes (not so easy to match all that moulding), try to fair them into the fuselage, or extend them down as four pulp-era 'flying buttress' landing legs? They - the last option, usually being depicted as tripods, not four-ways.

 

Shot on the old swivel-chair by the computer, I recognise the fabric! I rather miss it as it was quite comfortable, but it did fall apart in the end, and even nostalgia has to be let go eventually; nothing lasts forever. And the glare off the chrome engine reminds me, that camera (the second Fuji Finepix - never had another) was failing around March 2011, I got through the year borrowing Giles's little pocket thing!