Pro Resin 1/72 BTD-1 Destroyer
By Jodie Peeler
A few years back, Olimp’s Pro Resin line gave the 1:72 world a series of Douglas Destroyer kits. Though this big, single-engine bomber quickly faded into obscurity, it did provide a basis for the extremely successful and versatile Skyraider series of attack aircraft a few years later.
For me, the goofy-looking, gull-winged BTD-1 has been a mild fascination. The last remaining Destroyer was on display for many years at the lost, lamented Florence Air and Missile Museum in South Carolina. In several visits there during vacations in my youth, I got to see the BTD-1 up close. After the museum was shut down in 1997, the Destroyer and a few other refugees from Florence were relocated to the Wings of Eagles Museum at Elmira-Corning, New York. It recently underwent a much-needed restoration, and now the last Destroyer looks better than it has in years.
When Olimp released a BTD-1 a few years ago, I knew I had to build one. It only took a few years for me to get around to it, but I did. (Here’smy review of this kit, from May 2005.)
THE FUSELAGE
The first challenge I noticed during dry-fit was that the fuselage halves didn’t cleanly meet. There seemed to be pour-stub artifacts along the mating surfaces. This didn’t take long to fix, though; put 320-grit sandpaper on a flat surface, put the mating surfaces on the sandpaper, and gently work the fuselage halves in circular strokes. (Work carefully, of course, and don’t overdo it.) In no time, the fuselage halves mated nicely.
As these kinds of kits go, the cockpit is pretty nice. Unfortunately, getting it all to fit into the fuselage was an adventure for me. I lost count of how many times I had to dry-fit, trim, sand and dry-fit again. This was partly my doing, and partly because the fuselage interior has some thick areas inside. Eventually, though, I got it all in there. (I was out of Interior Green at the time, so I had to mix together some paint in great haste and at considerable expense. Please don’t laugh at the result.)
The interior relies on a good bit of photoetched material, as is typical for kits of this style. There’s not much, but it’s good photoetch, and it’s so thin it’s almost creepy. The etched seatbelts acted at times like they were made from paper, which made them easy for me to position.
Before sealing everything up, I loaded the forward fuselage with a significant amount of birdshot. (A 20-pound bag of birdshot, emptied into a surplus coffee can, will last a lifetime. C’mon, you’re a modeler. You have coffee cans around the house.) I knew from some testing that this model would be really tail-heavy, even with that big resin block of an engine up front. Once everything was aboard, I sealed the fuselage shut with no real surprises. Careful preparation, of course, will minimize the cleanup and filling you’ll have to do.
WINGS AND TAIL
Like many limited-run kits, the Destroyer relies on butt-joined flying surfaces. Those little stubby mounting pins on the wings were a noble effort, but I could tell they just weren’t gonna cut the mustard. And none of the other flying surfaces had any kind of positive locators. Nuts.
These kinds of joins fill me with dread. While my models fall short in finish, I try to put a lot of effort into strong structures. The paint may look like crap, but, by golly, you’re gonna have to run over the model with a D8 Caterpillar to hurt it. So I installed pins for all the joints on this model.
One of my first steps in building this model, before gluing or painting anything, was to tape the wings to the fuselage and carefully drill through the wing joints into the wings. This way, I had perfect alignment for the brass pins I’d later implant into the wings. I used a good many pins in each wing, and two pins in each of the tail surfaces. I also dressed the mating surfaces to minimize the cleanup I’d have to do later. Do this right and you won’t have any alignment problems in final assembly.
The wings had a couple of little problems. For one, they had some tiny pinholes that needed filling and sanding. This was easy enough, if tedious, to fix. More of a problem was those recesses in the top and bottom of each wing for the dive brakes. The recesses didn’t match the resin frames for the brakes (which were broken, anyway, in my kit), and, besides, I’ve never really been a fan of gratuitous deployment of anything on a model airplane. I wanted the brakes stowed on my model. I just filled the recesses with some putty and sanded it all flush, figuring I’d glue the etched brake parts on before painting.
ASSEMBLY AND PAINTING
That big chunk of a cowl section went on next. I drilled through it, and through the firewall of the fuselage, then inserted a piece of brass rod to secure everything. I drilled a corresponding hole through the back of the propeller hub, too, for the obvious reason.
This is the point in any model that gets either fun or tedious, depending on your worldview. For me, it became another adventure. Pro Resin gives you a beautiful vacuformed canopy. Yes, it’s beautiful. But it’s also a bit vague in detail. And I still am working on my proficiency with them. As if that’s not enough fun, you get exactly one canopy in the kit. I got it cut out and reasonably trimmed, and glued some strips of plastic along the rim of the cockpit opening to help guide and reinforce the installation of this little gem. The canopy went on just fine. Unfortunately, there were gaps. I like to minimize seams in this area, and there were some mismatches. A lot of very careful masking, filling and sanding ensued. After a lot of work, I got the worst of it taken care of. Once I did final masking of the canopy, a couple of primer coats and the final finish coat provided a nice scale thickness for the canopy framing.
Remember how I told you the photoetch is nice and thin? This almost got me in trouble installing the cowl flaps and dive brakes. The cowl flaps needed some careful bending to get around those shapes (the less lazy may want to make new ones from thin styrene). And one of those dive brakes folded up on itself as I glued it on the wing. Fortunately, I got it straightened out with little fuss. It’s thin photoetch, but it’s mostly forgiving in the hands of the butterfingered among us.
The kit gives you the wing cannon fairings, but they looked out of place and sort of loused up how the airplane looks. Maybe it’s not completely accurate, but I left them off.
After a couple of primer coats, the model was ready for paint. I’ve never been good with feathered edges, and I have a small collection of unorthodox types in Gloss Sea Blue, so I went with that option. Many pictures depict the overall blue BTD-1s with a four-bladed prop, but that would require more effort than I was willing to provide. (Among other issues, you’d have to find the right prop, hog out the cowl, install correct engine, and do more things that would have taken the pleasure away for a bit.) So I was happy to find a picture of a BTD-1 with a three-bladed prop and no wing cannon fairings, in overall sea blue, with just the national insignia. Sold. Painting was really difficult: overall Testors Model Master acrylic Gloss Sea Blue. Oh, and Interior Green for the wheelwells.
(By the way, I know there’s a very nice Steve Ginter book about the Destroyer. But it’s not in our library, and other priorities are on my acquisitions list. I did the best I could with what the Interwebs had to offer.)
FIDDLY BITS
This kit has beautiful landing gear…but it’s resin. And skinny resin pieces don’t like to bear weight. No problem. An afternoon with a pin vise and nothing else to do, and I drilled through the length of each main strut and inserted brass rod. Enough protruded from the mating end to fit into a corresponding hole at the attach point in the wing. I felt the attach points for the wheels were flimsy, so I replaced the little resin nub on each with wire, too. As best I could figure, the wheels and struts were silver, so I airbrushed them with some aluminum paint. The tires are brush-painted with Aircraft Interior Black.
FINAL ASSEMBLY
Decals in these kinds of kits make me nervous; they’re usually very nice and thin, but they tend not to want to move. Fortunately, these decals cooperated with me. As prescribed by the photograph I found, the national insignia markings were all I put on the model. (This also let me save the Naval
Air Test Center lettering for another project.) I didn’t have any pictures of the top of the wings, so I didn’t know if the dive brakes atop the port wing were painted to match the insignia. I punted and applied the decal over the brakes, applied about eight gallons of solvent over it, and thought about happy things for a while.
All the planning and pinning meant that final assembly went in a snap. The only real problem – one I could have avoided with some foresight – was assembling the propeller, with its separate blades. I could have drilled and pinned the blades for proper alignment, but I got lazy and eyeballed it instead. It’s not perfect, but it’s close enough that I don’t notice it, anyway. (I’ll sure bet you do, though.)
Was it worth it? I’d say so. I had an idea from the first time I saw this kit that it would be a pleasant build, and, for the most part, the kit bore me out. There were some things that didn’t go precisely as I’d hoped, but much of that is probably “operator error” more than anything else. I don’t keep a log on my builds, but I’d be surprised if this whole build took me 20 hours. It was a pleasant diversion, and the model captures the beefy, brutish look of the real airplane. It brings back a lot of memories. And, best of all, it’s something different.
Thanks to Pro Resin for the review.