Martin P5M MARLIN
Patrol Flying Boat
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Entex 1:285
by David Smith Here are some pics of my 1/285th scale P5M:
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FULL RES...I built it a few years ago from a very old and rare Entex kit...(which is) a nice little kit considering it's size and it's age (late '60s early '70s). It has very fine raised panel lines and the fit of all the parts was excellent with little to no joint filling. The only drawback to the kit was no beaching gear which I scratch built from scrap plastic...I added the small antennas made from pieces of sheet plastic and the antenna wire from stretched sprue. I scratch built the Tilly crane from bits of strip plastic and stretched sprue...The truck was an N scale pick up (that was way under scale) that I converted to a stake truck to give a sense of enormity to the plane.
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FULL RES My father (worked with, and flew on this aircraft, when he) was stationed in Iwakuni, Japan in '63-65. I spent a lot of wonderful hours watching those big seaplanes take off with JATO/RATO packs on them boosting them out of the water in a cloud of smoke. Late at night when the crews returned from their 12 hour patrols I would watch them pull up to the ramp, put on the beaching gear, and then be towed out of the water onto the flight line. The P5M was a huge plane and at 10 years old I thought they were giants. I remember getting to step inside one of those behemoths it was fantastic, there was radio/radar gear everywhere and bunk beds so the crew could rest on very long patrols. There was even a small area set up like a kitchen, WOW!!
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FULL RES...The hardest part of the painting was the cockpit windows and observation windows in the tail...The decals in the kit were ok but when I tried to use them they cracked and split so most of the decals were from various Microscale sheets I had in my box of spares. The safety walk panels on the top of the main wings were masked off and painted as well as the red prop warning stripe...I guessed at the dimensions I took it from a pic in my Dad's cruise book of a Tilly parked on the flight line behind one of the planes.
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FULL RES...The P5M was the Navy's last seaplane. In '67-68 they were retired and scraped except for one plane. It is the last remaining intact P5M and can be seen on display (as above) at the Navy Air Museum in Pensacola Fl.
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FULL RES...I had a choice of paint schemes - either the white over blue or white over gull gray - because in 1965-66 most of the squadrons were in transition from the blue to the gray. Both the VP-40 and VP-50 deployed to Vietnam for Operation Market Time with almost half of the planes in the squadrons painted one of these color schemes. I chose the white over blue because it just looked better to me."
