Thanks for sharing these.
I saw the Graf, but cant find the alternate parts for the ZR-3, nor the mentioned Akron/Macon kits?
Did I miss them?
Would love to build the whole fleet; eventually find the Shenandoah...
Thanks again...
Thanks for whomever fixed the link. Works now!
This is a great find.
All that we need to find is a kit for the Shenandoah and the ZR-2. Hathaway made a Macon kit, someone made a Los Angeles kit in a slickback book (mine wiped out in a flood! Too damaged to determine who authored it...), and someone made a tiny Akron only a few inches long a few years back.
I don't think anyone has ever modeled the ZR-1, Shenandoah, which had a short but spectacular career. It was the first US designed airship. It was different in look (thinner, leaner), than its successors. The ZR-2 was never named; a British built sister ship to the ill-fated R-38. I don't know it well enough to determine whether an R-38 kit (which exists) would look like it. It was never named because it was destroyed before delivered from England. I'll have to research that, but since it never actually entered the fleet, ZR-2 is more a curiosity-fact than an actual US airship (the fleet member who never was...).
ZR's- 3,4,& 5 have been discussed above (Los Angeles, a sister ship to the Graf Zeppelin, delivered as a war reparations payment, and the true sister ships of Akron and Macon; both US designed and built). Only the ZR-3, the German built, survived her entire career; Akron and Macon lost in poor weather, like the ZR-1. I went to the field in Ohio a couple of years ago to see the marker where Shenandoah fell.
So hopefully a ZR-1 will make its way into the paper model catalogue...
[fingers crossed...]
