Modeling Now and Then:
Electrical Engineering 101 . . . at Age 13
The shelves in the toy-and-hobby section of Thunderbird Drug Store showed
a variety of boxes, with a variety of notations. Comet boxes said “Lockheed
Starfighter” and “Douglas Skyknight”…Aurora boxes
said “British Spitfire”, “Fokker Dr.1 Triplane”,
and “Japanese Zero”. Monogram’s were crisp and precise:
“SBD Dauntless Dive Bomber” and “HU-16B Albatross”.
But I remember the Lindberg boxes: they didn’t have plain designations,
but descriptions: “British Carrier Fighter”, “Twin Jet
Navy Fighter”, and even “Korean War Supersonic Jet Fighter”.
–This last, I caught a glimpse of, as it peeked provocatively out
of the top of one of Mother’s shopping bags, when she returned home
late one afternoon, just before Christmas. Drove me nuts for nearly two
weeks, waiting for the organized Christmas unwrapping to find out if that
was “ours” or “theirs”… an F-86 or MiG-15.
So the box labels distinguished The Lindberg Line from others, and so
did their choice of subject matter. My last column ended by suggesting
that the resurgence of the old Line can’t be due only to nostalgia.
To this day, Lindberg’s the only one who’ve ever molded, in
my favorite scale of 1/48th, the XF-88 Voodoo, Curtiss Jenny, or Douglas
X-3 Stiletto.
But those aren’t the things that really take me back. It’s
remembrance of my first lesson in applied electronics…and of the
capitalist economic phenomenon known as Customer Service.
Shortly after I emerged from the Dark Ages (along about 1997), and realized
I had to build scale plastic kits again, my father scored quite a coup.
That Christmas, he gave me yellow Testor’s boxes he’d found
at the drug store—yes, drug stores still, to this day, sometimes
contain a shelf or two of plastic models. They contained a Nieuport 17,
and a Chance Vought Corsair.
I was now sophisticated enough to know, as I spilled the pieces out onto
the table, that they had to be old and weren’t very good; I’d
seen some excellent modern Revellogram and Tamiyagawa by then. But memory
cells were stirred… “Gosh, these look familiar…”
The Nieuport turned out to be the old Hawk moldings, which I’d first
built it in 1964. As for the Corsair, as I turned the blue pieces over
and over in my hands, sunlight from the window played over the surfaces,
and finally, there on the inside of the left fuselage half, very faintly
engraved by obviously-worn molds, but still legible, were the words “Copyright
1951 Paul Lindberg”.
My father had managed to give me, again, kits he probably first paid
for more than three decades previously!
Looking forward towards the engine compartment, I could see unused bulkhead
flanges. They were set close together, as to hold a thin plate just aft
of the firewall. It came to me then. Way back when, I’d been gifted
with the kit…not a mere “F4U Corsair”, but a “Marine
Attack Fighter”, a huge dark blue machine bristling with guns, rockets,
and bombs. Inside its checkerboard cowl—according to the box top—was
a patented Realistic Prop Action electric motor!
The motor was a whole kit, in and of itself. Lots of interesting parts:
an armature shaft, 17 little steel armature laminations, insulated thin
copper wire, “brushes”, contacts, “field pieces”,
and magnet, all to fit inside an ingenious molded two-piece case.
It had perfectly simple instructions, but I managed to blow the construction.
Thinking back on it, I believe the most likely reason for my failure to
get the motor to run was that I must’ve reversed the direction of
winding the coils as the wires crossed from one side to the other. This
makes for a quite static electromagnet. My trauma of connecting a battery
and finding out that my handiwork wouldn't run was, however, tempered
by my first favorable experience with a Customer Service department. With
parental encouragement—after all, my parents had no clue how to
assemble electric motors correctly!—I wrote a note to the Lindberg
company, explaining my difficulties. Eventually the mailman handed me
a small brown box with a fully assembled motor, which quite unlike mine,
worked perfectly.
The motor made the plane unique among my models. Its propeller turned
all by itself, with a satisfying low hum, and I “flew” it
against targets from my Army Men set, bombing and strafing. Maneuverability
was a bit impaired, though: you had to hold the plane by its base, since
that contained the battery!
It’s too bad I didn't repeat the experiment, and the lesson about
building electric motors, especially because I had the means at hand.
Look at this box art: I just now scanned it. I’m the original owner!
The “Air Force Tank Destroyer” came to me sometime after
the “Marine Attack Fighter”. I took it up with enthusiasm,
but its timing was bad. It was only partly assembled when I had to pack
it all up and move from my childhood home on Lenox Avenue in Lakewood,
to the new house Father built on East Hill in Kent. In the course of the
move, the P-47 fell into ruin and was never completed. I saved its box
only by happenstance, because I had other modeling stuff to put into it.
It didn’t occur to me, at the time, that such a box would someday
be fought over by nostalgic Aging Baby Boomers on eBay!
The motor kit you see isn’t left over from either of those old
Lindberg kits. It’s recently acquired from Skyway Hobbies, which
deals in old kits from estate sales or from modelers sloughing off old
kits to buy new ones. A quest for quality overcoming nostalgia, I suppose…
but one such kit was another old Lindberg, an F-100 Super Sabre whose
box top claimed that a very familiar-looking motor kit would provide “Authentic
Jet Sound”!
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I opened the box, hardly daring to expect the little electric motor
kit to still be in there, but it was. I didn't build it, but instead,
threw together the Super Sabre for silent decoration of a grandkid’s
ceiling. I briefly considered re-opening the nose of my old Corsair rebuild,
to ‘fix’ my failure of forty-two years ago. But no: I’m
going to hang onto it just for its nostalgic and conversation value. What
I think I’ll do instead is put a modern, pre-built electric motor—I
have several—into a kit of the P-47 Thunderbolt—sorry!—I
meant to say “Air Force Tank Destroyer”—and paint it
exactly like the box top you see here. Electrical engineering…leave
to people qualified to do it. It’s all I can do to carry out our
philosophical mandate:
Build what YOU want, the way YOU want to …and above all, have fun!
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