Sunday, August 3, 2014
Partly cloudy & very humid
Partly cloudy & very humid
Tom Sanders Sends
me an E-Mail
It's always nice to hear from people that I write about, so when I saw Mr. Tom Sanders name on my g-mail list of new e-mails, I had to check out what he had written. As it turns out, Tom had been working on a Wyandotte Airacuda and customizing it for a Canadian client. I'm Canadian, eh! He originally sent me small images, but I asked for larger ones so that I might share his fine customized restorization with you.
The "real" airplane was an American fighter warplane that was developed by the Bell Aircraft Corporation in order to expand into the aircraft business. Unfortunately, the design was flawed from the start, and eventually all of the airplanes were simply scrapped (never saw action).
Below is an artist's drawing of the Airacuda
The toy that Tom worked on for this customer restoration was made by Wyandotte (USA).
It has a wingspan of 8 1/2" (216 mm) and a length of 6 1/2" (166 mm) .
Notice that the toy does not have a rear vertical tail, and has a larger-sized rear landing wheel.
The Wyandotte toy originally came in only one colour, but there were several different colours to choose from. Tom's version is certainly much more colourful;l, and more detailed.
The original Wyandotte did not have any machine guns, whereas Tom's version has 4.
I also like how Tom has painted the roof of the cabin to simulate the plexiglass canopy that you can see on the artist's sketch at the beginning of this post.
On the original toy, there is simply a solid colour.
I like how the ends of the propeller blades are painted yellow. This was done so that anyone approaching an airplane that had its engines running, could see the yellow as the large propellers rotated at thousands of RPMs (Revolutions per Minute). There was always this danger!
Even the underside of the airplane is painted a blue. If this were a real airplane, the purpose would have been to have the underbelly blend in with the blue sky if an enemy was approaching from below. The colours on the top are painted in a camouflage pattern,which would have blended in with the jungle of the Pacific islands in WWII.
Thanks for dropping by,
and as always,
have a great part of the day or night,
wherever you may be.
Stacey
toysearcher@gmail.com
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