LL certainly looks in safe hands with Marks now, he is leaving his stamp already.
You won’t get an argument from me on this one! I’ve been extremely fortunate in finding someone of H.G.'s calibre to put his own stamp on LL. He’s a pleasure to work with!
Repairs
No flowery intro here, just a photo update on things that needed to be fixed, and now are.
I’ll start with the damaged national insignia decal under the stbd. wing. Here’s a glimpse of it back in Edmonton.
being sanded off and rescribed in Brooklyn,
repainted,
and now reapplied.
I will always love the contrast between the grey star and the white bars.
Here’s the broken top to the #3 engine turbosupercharger.
Here are the replacement parts I mailed over.
And here is the repair, with a nice look into the interior of the wheel well and the bomb bay too
Here’s the model with the severed stbd. horizontal stabilizer
And here’s the part re-attached and puttied
then sanded and repainted
Finally, the scratch-built aft crew door has progressed from this
to this, with the primed #4 engine cowling off to the side.
Thanks to Marks, these are satisifying images to see. We are making progress.
I am leaving the sequence of work up to Marks, but inevitably we will have to return to the nose
the nose guns there, and what improvements he can make to the long-since ripped out bungie cords for the guns I tried to make (wait for it folks) back in December of 2016!
This is what, in a perfect world, should be replicated!
But this isn’t a perfect world, not with a closed fuselage! I view the task like building a ship in a bottle,
impossible for me, and I have no idea how it could be done. I’ve only asked Marks to give it a shot, and he’s considering it, and for that alone he has my thanks, regardless of the outcome.
Masterful and awesome!
Wow, great update & brilliant interior view, bravo Marks & I swear I can hear HG’s applause too - clearly the Lady’s in very safe hands.
Coincidentally I saw an ep of Antique Roadshow (UK) last night, one item was a glass bottle painted by a well-known contemporary Chinese artist. Guess how it was painted…
Oh yeah, with ultra-fine multi-angled brushes onto the inside surface. They didn’t say if the artist’s in a padded cell, but if he was me I’d be so ticked off it’s apparently only worth about £500, about a quid for each hour of work.
Anyhoo please nobody infer I’m making comparisons, it just boggled my mind & maybe yours too. As somebody said about Politics, Model-making is the Art of the Possible.
The lit up shot of the forward nose gives me pause for a painting.
Great update and the works being carried out/completed look exceptional and Marks is certainly the chap to take up the torch on this one … 
… I also love the shot through the open nose and the inside view … Super detailing …
Exactly. This particular B-17 flew on both Schweinfurt missions, 17 Aug 1943 and 14 Oct 1943. Here’s a wonderful painting of Vicious Virgin and Luscious Lady during the Second Schweinfurt mission.
The artist absolutely nailed the correct color schemes for the aircraft, which is the plan for this build.
The analogy is correct. We are dealing with works of art with builds like this.
The Nose
Way back when, this was how I had nearly finished the forward floor of the B-17F nose.
I scratch-built the green ammo box. I know I must have seen things like it in the hundreds of B-17 pics I studied, though I believe it was largely inspired by this shot of LL’s nose
where you can see that gunbelt from the nose gun disappearing into a triangular shape behind the plexiglass.
Here’s another shot showing the interior more complete with “stuff.”
The yellow squares are supposed to be “fool the eye” seat cushions where the bombadier would kneel to deal with either the nose gun or the Norden Bombsight. And a 303rd BG vet told me there was no navigator seat in the F aircraft, and instead the navigator placed a cushion on top of an extra ammo box and used that as a seat.
It makes sense. You can see the claustrophia of the space from these two photos…
This shows off the ammo boxes and the cushions, and there are no chairs visible.
When LL arrived in Brooklyn, the wood floor was gone, as were the objects on it. So I asked Marks to replicate my work, after sending him some floor pieces my late friend, Art B. made years ago.
He certainly did, and then some.
Here is his version of my lost green ammo box.
And here’s another view, showing some weathering.
Of course, looking at my prior work, you see a wooden ammo box behind the green tub. I had used up all my resin ammo boxes so couldn’t provide one.
No problem for an expert!
Can you believe?!
I lack both the imagination and skill to pull that off.
Here they are together, prior to weathering.
And here they are with a test placement on the reinstalled floor.
The careful viewer will note that Marks has added at least one small detail on the stbd, bulkhead that wasn’t present in my work.
I’m not complaining.
Great update and really nice to see all this forward movement in getting LL on track again … Marks is putting in the overtime for sure…
Regarding your internal image of the nose gunner/ bomb aimer…that must of been a hell of a view looking out that nose cone for hours on end …
