Glencoe's Retriever Rocket

Rumors of my modeling demise have been greatly exaggerated.  LOL  I've still been building but with the latest Apple iPhone update, it's more difficult to upload images from my phone to the PC. So things have slowed down. But anyway...

Glencoe's Retriever Rocket has been around a while, and while I vaguely remember building it in my youth, I decided to try it again. 

So far the only problem I had, was that out of the box one of the rings had snapped - 

No worries, that should be easy to fix.
The next thing I noticed is that the large "flight deck" windows reveal ... nothing when you look in.  So I had two choices, to create a flight deck or to darken the windows so you can't see in.  I chose the former and started my search  for parts to fill the void. The model box says the kit is 1/72 so I got my casts of a 1/72 pilot and created a few more. My craft will have 3 in there. I also found 3 seats on Megahobby. Looking for 1/72 instruments to busy up the area, I came up empty, so I did the next best thing in getting PE instruments in 1/48.

Starting with the flight deck, once I got the windows in, I then got out my strip styrene to create a back wall, and a floor, and painted it gray. The window part is very thick, so I painted the edge black and then glued the instrument PE to the edge of the window - 

From there the rest of the build was easy - with the exemption of the port hole windows. There was no problem with them, but while cleaning the tab off one, it flew and was promptly swallowed by the carpet monster. 

Once it was all together, the entire interior was very hard to see. While you can see a pilots head in the window, I had the feeling the pilots are too big. I should have used HO (1/87) figures. I also should have painted the flight deck a lighter color so you could see in better. Oh well. 

With building essentially done, I turned to painting. Then I noticed something odd. The paint instructions on the instruction sheet does not match the colors used on the box art. Hmm. I decided to go with what's in the instructions.  I started by applying Rustoleum white paint/primer. There was need to fix some seam lines on the hull, then a repaint.

 The rest of the painting went without incident, and I'm calling this one done. In the finished images, note that the side port hole windows are made with  Microscale Kristal Klear. Thanks for looking. 

 

Hard to see. There's 3 pilots in there.