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Roden 1/144 Douglas C-124A Globemaster

By Matt Bittner

Introduction

While the official title of the Douglas C-124A was "Globemaster", its crew referred to it as "Old Shakey" because of how it behaved with all four engines running. It served with distinction from 1950 until 1974, seeing operations in Vietnam.

The Kit

The Roden 1/144 C-124A consists of 102 pieces of gray, injected plastic and two pieces of clear - a canopy/windscreen and a landing light. (While there are 102 parts for the C-124A, there are extra parts not used on the sprue.) The pieces appear well cast, but be aware everything is a "butt-join", so you may want to add something to at least the wings so they won't come off later. Decals are for one scheme, that of a C-124A that flew tih the Military Air Transport Service (MATS), 1954. It was finished primarily in overall natural metal, with red stripes on the tail and wings.

Construction starts with the cockpit and nose landing gear well. Once those are assembled and painted, then they're added to one fuselage half and the fuselage halves assembled. One note: there is no indication in the instructions of needing nose weight. I would be very surprised is this model didn't require some, so I would add as much as possible to the nose.

Now that the fuselage is assembled, then the stabs are glued together along with the wheels and landing gear. The next tep is to assemble the veritcal tail followed by all four engines (after painting them, of course).

The next two steps have me confused. In Step 10 you are to drill three holes in the trailing edge between the wing-tip and the outer engine. However, in Step 11 - which is assembling the other wing - drilling holes isn't shown at all. I suspect these holes are for the trailing-edge balances that are added in Steps 14 and 15, so I bet you'll need to drill the holes in Step 11. I will definitely look at real examples and study the parts in detail before I proceed with construction.

With all the major parts assembled, it's time to build an aircraft. Step 12 has you glue the vertical and horizontal tail pieces, along with the wings, to the built-up fuselage.

The next page of instructions is very interesting. At the top of the page is shown measurements, for where some items like antenna are supposed to be placed. When you get to the numbered steps of the instructions, you're to refer to this set of measurement drawings to get these pieces correctly installed. You'll definitely want to pay close attention to all of this. These next instruction steps have you glue the landing gear and gear doors (best left until after painting) as well as all the antenna and mass balances to the trailing edge of the wings. And there are a lot of them, so patience is a must.

Conclusion

A very nice addition to the 1/144 modeling world, and it would appear there will be more versions coming, as some parts already exist for the later versions, while some other parts will probably come on a separate sprue, although time will truly tell. This is a great kit that will look like "Old Shakey" when built up.

Many thanks to Roden for sending the review kit.