Stinson L5 Sentinel

Only for a special breed of modellers:

This rendering represents the observer plane.  A very plain box with stick-on label contains the bare bones, which the builder must flesh out using skill, ingenuity, patience, persistence, and a well stocked parts box.  Molded in thick, white, somewhat soft plastic are 2 fuselage halves, 4 wing pieces, 2 tailplanes, a pair of misshapen wheels, and a barely recognizable propeller.  The transparencies come as a split vacu-form. Instructions are a single page diagram with stencils for making struts, gear legs, and other DIY doo-dads.  A decal sheet of 4 US insignia is uselessly off color, out of register, and out of focus. Out of your mind is how you think you must be to tackle this project, but challenge is the appeal of these kits. On the plus side, surface detail is crisp. On the minus side, most of it must be ground away to correct contour problems, particularly on the airfoils. The molding technique, whatever it may have been, resulted in thick panels with an exaggerated camber. Thinning the underside can do just so much before the chord gets whittled away.  The modeler has 2 choices:  re-shape the surface side and replace lost detail, neither of which is easy in this soft plastic; or accept the deformity and avoid looking too closely at trailing edges, where the departure from reality is most acute.