The T34 was the basic trainer replacement for the T6, and while it may not be as legendary as the T6 it has served longer its training role than the Texan did. First flown in 1950 and still in service with the Navy as the T34C Turbo Mentor, the T34 airframe has been in service for nearly 50 years! Based on the Beech Bonanza, spare parts for this economical trainer are easy to find, and civilian pilots find it a fun but forgiving "warbird."

I wanted to build a Navy trainer as it appeared early in the Mentor's career. A found a good color photo in the Hook of a Saufly Fieldbased T34 in 1955, its glossy yellow paint shining in the sun. That's the one, I thought, and I went to work at replicating it.

I started with the Hasegawa T34A, which needed some very minor conversion work. The Navy's T34B had a small fillet below the rudder removed, which was a twominute job with an XActo knife. The small bulge on the batter compartment panel on the starboard side was made from a spare bump in a KP MiG19 kit. Altering the kit's wing dihedral by one degree was almost unnecessary, and the arrowhead antenna of the "B" model was fashioned from some spare photoetched brass parts.

The cockpit was improved with Eduard parts and seats yanked out of a Hasegawa SH60 helicopter. I used styrene strip to replicate stringer detail, and control columns modified from an Italeri OH6 went in front of the seats.

When I first built this model at age 11, I discovered why you put weight in the nose of tricyclelanding gear models. This time, I poured about four ounces of diced lead weights in the noseno more tailsitting for this model!

When the basic construction was complete, I testfitted the kit canopy, which was too thick to show any interior detail. To fix this problem, I pushed the canopy into a block of clay to produce a female mold and poured plaster into the resulting cavity. When the plaster master had dried, I thermoformed clear plastic around each of the four canopy sections, cut them out individually, and posed them open on the model.

The plane was airbrushed with Testors Model Master trainer yellow. I used waterbased Varathane to put a shine on the model, and cut black decal trim film to shape to form the antiglare panels.

The rest of the markings came from Aeromaster's generic black numbers and letters sheets, and SuperScale sheets for the T28 provided the stars and bars, rescue arrows and other details. To bring out the control surface panel detail, I "painted" them with a black watercolor pencil, allowed the paint to dry, and then removed the excess paint with a lightlymoistened cotton swab.

T34B Mentor in 1:72 ataglance

Kit: Hasegawa

Cockpit Details: Eduard

Seats: Hasegawa SH60

Control Columns: Italeri OH6

Canopy: scratchbuilt

Paint: Testors Model Master

Decals: Aeromaster and SuperScale

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