Gee Bee Early – Dora Wings

Dora wings from Ukraine have some interesting kits, especially often neglected ones from the 1920-1930s.

Gee Bee was purpose built for speed records and piloted by Doolittle, before he became even more famous for organizing and leading the raid on Tokyo after Pearl Harbor during WW2.
The kit itself is a limited run type kit, very large attachment points, flash, and question fit all around. The decals though are very nice and they include vinyl masks to help with the scallop red scheme. Without these masks, the painting would have been much, much onerous.
Work starts with the cockpit, and its fairly detailed. Honestly though, given how thick and small the canopy is, you can’t really see anything. You do have to option to cut out the entry hatch, so you can see something through their if you get just the right angle. So the first thing I did was added some plastic pieces to simulate the wooden framework, just enough in the areas where its possible to see.

The rest of the cockpit is assembled as a single unit and the fit is very poor. Some of the rods I had to replace since they broke as I was trying fit them. There are included PE to add some details, but it’s up to you whether you think it’s worthwhile, as besides the seat belts nothing much can be seen of these.

Its too bad, as the instrument panel is actually pretty nice.

To close everything up, you really need to sand down the edges of the cockpit tub and do some major grinding of the fuselage bottom, otherwise you will have major gaps. The

Once you get pass this stage, you can choose to sand down the exaggerated fabric effect like I did or just leave it alone. If you really really want to get a good effect, I would fill in between with putty and sand everything down with just a hint of the ridges. But that was beyond what I was willing to put into this kit, as for a small little plane I was just worn down. Next up was the engine, which is pretty nice and surprisingly good fitting.

At this stage, the little guy was ready for paint. So after apply Vallejo gray primer and then the white, the masks were applied, and Tamiya Red was used.

The canopy had a poor fit and I messed it up a bit. At this point though I just wanted to get it done – so decals were applied, some light oil wash to bring out some panel line details, and finally rigging finished up the kit. Not one of my best builds for sure, but glad to build some more civilian planes that pushed aviation progress along.




