hawk Spirit of St Louis Ryan NYP
lesson learned: keep desktop heater away from kit

vintage Hawk kit built out of the box, slightly deforming the rudder by applying heat from a desktop space heater in my kit-making cave, trimming the top ordinals decal down to just the black, scratch building a tail skid after the first one melted, slightly enhancing the wind vane (which at first I thought was a stub of sprue still attached to fuselage and almost cut off but decided to work with it once realizing it did have some shape) and painting the tires and engine black. Coolest tip: for the engraved "Spirit" on the cowl, fill the recess with ink. No need for silvered vintage kit decal. See tail and underwing marking to see how that process went.