Fiat GB.500 bis

February 26, 2016 · in Aviation · · 9 · 1.4K

Right, you say, there were never anything like that...i think. Well, anyway, here they are. In the 30´s the Italian Fiat company desperately needed a new product. All in-house designs were deemed too...Italian, and thus Fiat ventured to other countries to look for a design that met the demands. In America they finally laid their hands on the blue prints of the Granville brothers GeeBee racing machine. And the rest is history, as they say.

As you all know the black/green one is in Finnish camouflage and markings, the striped one is in a classic Italian costume.

The models are El Chupacabra from the animated Disney film "Planes", a scale plastic kit from . The kit actually depicts a GeeBee racer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gee_Bee_Model_R. For a short presentation from the Planes film, please check http://disneyplanes.wikia.com/wiki/El_Chupacabra?file=Disney%27sPlanes-_Meet_El_Chupacabra. The "face" portion was removed and a full interior cockpit was installed. Not sure about the stated 1/100 scale, think it works quite fine with both a 1/72 and a 1/48 pilot next to them. A small mouth at the bottom of the cowling was cut and filled; a cockpit with a instrumentation board, seat, rudder and stick and internal structure; aerial and mast; wind screen and sights scratched. Finally bracing wires made of acupuncture steel were added to both models.

Reader reactions:
7  Awesome

11 additional images. Click to enlarge.


9 responses

  1. Strange lookin' airplanes...didn't see the movie "Planes", but before I read your narrative, I thought to myself, "...those look like GeeBee's..." - lol
    Wish you'd have placed a 'common object' in one of the pics so I could see just how small they are. They look pretty good, though. 🙂

  2. Can warplanes look cute? Great detail for such a small scale.

  3. Very nice, lovely builds

  4. I'm currently building the model "Z" so these italian colors hit me when I saw the main picture 🙂 - the GeeBee origin was obvious 😀

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