P-80 metal ID model

[soslipstream]

Afternoon All-

I just finished a redo on this P-80 and is now posted on EBay as item#180518090363.

It came in pretty rough, played with shape but over the last month I slowly got it to be presentable again. I also hand-made the new mahogany stand and created a "Title Plate" that celebrates Lockheed and Allison Engines work together.

The model itself came with a short fin which only the XP-80A's had. The YP-80's all had a taller fin to better stabilze the airplane in the Yaw axis. The paint is close to Bronzart's (as noted on the P-47 resto at CollectAir.com).

Regards, Tom Sanders

[grwebster]

Did this model originally have gray paint?
I have one like it that I later learned came from Lockheed's model shop and have seen others.

[soslipstream]

GR,

Thanks for looking at the picture... This airplane had a couple of colors including a bit of gray. Most had been stripped off the airplane. I can believe that this was from Lockheed, call it a sixth sense or male intuition (on all things mechanical), that's why I created the the additional display stand bits.

It was not the cleanest or neatest cast piece. It could be cast aluminum which Lockheed would have had enough scrap to make castings. It appears to have been sand cast with lots of little voids which I have seen on other hand cast (as opposed to "production" cast) aluminum airplanes. Carefully addressing the voids and mini-pocks took time to tackle. I also had to keep in mind that this was an original period piece so making it too perfect would actually hurt the value.

Tom

[grwebster]

sounds very much like the one i have in aluminum.The heavy gray paint used covers any casting pronblems.
I saw an almost mint example on ebay a while back and it was a Lockheed in house piece mounted on a small tear drop metal base {like the bronzart one but much smaller} with the stand going into the tail pipe. My example is the production version I believe.
sorry for the bad pics but it is all I have here.