I'm a big air racing geek... Growing up not far from Reno, I started going to the National Championship Air Races in 1986 and was instantly hooked at 8 years old.
I've been back 16 times since then and have made a hobby out of researching the history of air racing and the airplanes involved.
Ever since I got started with R/C back in the early 1990's I've daydreamed about and planned out converting warbird kits into Reno and Cleveland racers. Small foamy warbirds make that an easy enough proposition that I can finally tackle some of these pent-up projects.
While working on the
Galloping Ghost, I was already thinking ahead to other famous race planes that could be bashed out of the great flying Parkzone warbirds. Looking at the K&A models P-51B/C conversion kits it occurred to me that Race #7 Beguine would be a pretty straightforward conversion!
Beguine had an interesting history, aside from being the airplane that ended Air Racing in 1949 when its pilot lost control and crashed into a house during the Thompson Trophy race. A pretty good summary can be found
here.
This is a very pretty German plastic model, but there are some details slightly different from Taichi's drawings. I'm certainly not a member of the scale police, but I will try to stick close to Taichi's drawings.
My build soundtrack for tonight was
Airspeed, a collection of Reno Racing sounds and short interviews - great stuff for hardcore airplane geeks like me. I had some time to get started on this mod tonight after almost 6 months of daydream and collecting parts... Here's where we are after day #1:
Taichi still does nice work.