Got a pair of Voodoos that must eventually look the same.
The painted one I did for my own amusement many years ago. The unpainted one has come together over a couple months. It's the 72nd Matchbox kit, of course. It's great for black-canopied desk models and little else.
I think it was at the IPMS Nationals in Milwaukee, 1978, that I was drinking beer and having a grand good time with a pack of Canadian modelers. Not too surprisingly, the subject of F/CF-101Bs came up and I whined about how I loved that airplane so much and that no 1/72nd kit of the two-seater was so unfair. Well they had a secret. One was coming. They couldn't say who was doing it, except that it was coming from the UK. I couldn't believe my ears. I didn't care who was doing the kit, just that it was being done.
When it was released in England, I was in semi-regular correspondence with Mike Silk at Modeltoys in Portsmouth. I knew there was enough interest in the thing locally that I asked him to get me a case of them - 12 kits - and send them on over. This he did, and some of my pals and I were certainly among the very first Yanks to get our little claws on 72nd scale Voodoo interceptors. I sold all but two, and one of them I proceeded to glue together the night it arrived. The longer I was at the project the more my disillusion grew. I knew of some Matchbox kits that weren't that bad. This Voodoo was the worst I ever tried to build. Tried to build, because once all the big parts were together and it was looking the part of a Voodoo, I abandoned it. Getting my "serious" F-101B out of that kit would not be worth the pain. Don't remember what happened to the second one. Maybe it's the painted one you see here.
That Matchbox F-101B still strikes me as something of a rush job. I think the lines are certainly good enough (though I think the canopy might be a little on the square side), but what a simplistic, odd, (what the hell are the separate oversized ailerons about?) poorly fitting kit it is.
Well, I'm not asking a lot of these two, so things should be fine.
