Killer Whale Restoration Project

What a mess!

I finally pulled my Killer Whale out of storage and this is what it looked like. Yeuch!! It's in a sad state of disrepair. Coated in dust and dirt, machine gun mounts and one of the cannons removed and the fans in an unknown state.

After opening the crew compartment, I was fortunate enough to find most of the missing pieces of the Whale. Missile racks, starboard side cannon, machine gun mounts, depth charges, and all the pieces of the fan assemblies. Plus some bonuses - one Annihilator and two Mega-Vipers with dry-rotted o-rings and three figure stands. The Mega-Vipers are great molds with hideous paint jobs!

The fan assemblies are in real rough shape. Three of the vertical rudders have broken apart and two are missing the bottom pegs that support the bottom cross-bars. I think I've got a plan to salvage the vertical fans.

At this point, I reassembled the bulk of the Whale (not the fan assemblies yet) and took a soft bristled paint brush and dusted the poor Whale off. It cleaned up pretty good! I've got my GI Joe troopers from the Toys R Us exclusive Firefly vs Troopers set manning the Whale for now. Decent set - more on that in a later post.

The 25th troops look to work well with the Whale. I think I can safely say that the Killer Whale is my #1 favorite GI Joe vehicle. It's just simple and awesome. I'd love to see Hasbro re-release it. I won't hold my breath, though!

So here is my plan for repairing the vertical fins - I've used painter's tape to line them up and hold them together. I need to get some sheet plastic and cut some small strips to go across the connection points, glue them down and paint them.

Stay tuned for more updates! Hope to get the fans restored and clean up the body much more extensively.