30th October 2025
A bitty day that began with a much-needed haircut and trip to the post office and will end with a meal out with family. Oh and in between I’ve finished my written work for this month, cleaned-up the seams on my Marauder and then, unsuccessfully tried to find some interesting colour schemes and decals that may have helped my model look just a little different from the norm. Yeah, a bitty day.
I was genuinely surprised by the lack of decals for the Marauder. It seems to have passed the world’s manufacturers by, or perhaps hasn’t fired their imaginations in quite the same way as other types that I could mention. Hunt for B-17 decals and you are on to a winner; do the same with the B-26 and you’ll find almost nothing of note and when you do stumble across a sheet or two, most are in olive drab/neutral gray schemes, with pretty much nothing in natural metal. It was pretty much a pointless hunt.
So I’m left with using the decals from the kit or at least some of them, my plan being to paint as much as possible. I even looked into using our newly acquired cutter to create some custom masks only to hit the brakes when I realised that a) I had no idea how to use the machine b) I had no time to learn and c) even if I did manage to learn everything in needed to create those masks, the masking material would not arrive until next Thursday and the model has to be finished by Friday. So decals it is.
As it stands, the model only needs its seams finessing and I am ready apply some paint, decanted Tamiya AS-12 Bare Metal Silver being my likely first port of call before heading to other painterly destinations, Tamiya LP ‘silvers’ and Gunze Super Metallics to create an interesting patchwork quilt of metal loveliness. The real machines were quite degraded in service, so I may try and replicate that, perhaps even – because I’m bloody-minded and have to be different… – build one of the metal aircraft without invasion stripes, an obvious look before those distinctive additions were made. We will, as they say, see…
See you tomorrow.
SPENCER POLLARD'S KIT BOX 
What would be really interesting would be a scheme in natural metal of a plane that had the full D-Day invasion stripes top and bottom and then had the upper stripes removed during the summer of 1944. You could show the “ghost” images of the paint where it was not completely removed – just the faintest trace to make an interesting and not usually seen scheme. That would make your model stand out…..
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