nearsightedjohn

This P-61C located at the Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy facility (photo from https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/northrop-p-61c-black-widow/nasm_A19510044000) does look pretty gloss black and my understanding is that the Smithsonian no longer restores aircraft to “as new” condition but rather with the original “as found” patina intact. I’ll probably go with a satin finish with light chipping/ weathering on my build and hope to incorporate some variation in the black among the various panels. I imagine these aircraft got pretty weathered/ beat up/ faded at Iwo Jima.

Completed both engines: Plugged the four slots on the underside of the wings with Evergreen sheet styrene: These slots are for auxiliary fuel tanks which unfortunately were not included in the P-61B kit. Too bad because I believe these were the rule in the PTO, particularly in Iwo Jima. I also bonded the nose weight into the inside of the clear nose piece using five min epoxy: Hoping tomorrow to clean up the slot repairs and re-scribe as necessary, bond the nose and canopies in place, mask the canopies and then prime the airframe and nacelles.

Great choice James! I have this unbuilt kit in one of my 38 boxes as well and look forward to seeing how you do on this. The weird tandem engines and the Fritz X bombs adds additional interest to me. A lot of folks replace the thick kit-supplied front canopy glass with thinner AM vacuum-form pieces - do you plan to stick with the kit glass?

Today’s progress: Airframe bonded together and some filler putty applied: Engine final assembly started: The fit of the intakes and exhaust headers required some paint and plastic removal to get things seated. I’m messing with kit-supplied PE plug wires and oh what a challenge! I will likely not fight connecting each wire to each plug because very little will be visible through the nacelle openings (not going to expose the engines on this one). Still having some fun here & there!

That was my first thought too! Never knew about this aircraft, thanks for expanding my IJN aircraft education! I enjoyed watching your WIP and really like your “less is more” weathering. Beautiful build!

Yes, that’s it! The USAAF commodity managers were running short of amphetamines for the night flight crews in ‘45 and decided to have the cockpits painted brighter to keep the flyboys awake on those long flights over water in the dark! Think I’ll go with that for now….

Thanks Wings! The green/ yellow zinc chromate is starting to look too bright again to my eyes in these photos. I’m wondering if I should airbrush these internal cabin details with a highly diluted flat black misting??? I’ll make that decision after I check just how bright these cabin feature look through the canopies when I dry fit them tomorrow.

Todays progress: Tires painted (XF-85 black rubber): Front & rear cabins assembled into the fuselage: The three sets of lap belts provided by GWH were a complete disaster for me, I ended up replacing them with Eduards belts that I had in my spares. I also bonded the booms to the wings: Im hoping my next progress report will include the fuselage + wing/ biooms + rear horizontal stabilizer/ elevator all bonded together. The engines also need some work getting the intake and exhaust headers to all fit together. So far it’s been a so-so kit fit-wise but I am still having fun.

Black/ burnt umber oil wash applied to my day-glow zinc chromate parts. Still a little on the bright side but hopefully will tone down even more later with some dry-brushing. I applied some of the kit supplied dial decals to the IP in a somewhat random fashion (the instructions were totally bogus so I had to do some guessing). These GWH decals are very difficult to get to conform even with Micro-Sol/ Micro-Set. I’ll dry-brush this one and call it done.

Beautiful finish of what sounds like a challenging kit. I love the 1/20 F1 subjects that Ebbro has kitted but they can definitely be more fiddly and exasperating than Tamiya and Fujimi to assemble. I’ve tried to do more test fitting and debugging BEFORE painting on later Ebbro F1 attempts and have had to replace the molded-in spindle hinge bosses with brass rod on more the a few I’ve built. Worth it I guess because these late 60’s/ early 70’s F1 race cars are SO COOL!!!!

Finally getting some color on these parts. The zinc chromate (Tamiya XF-3 yellow with small amounts of XF-5 green titrated to the right look) is a little crazy bright , hopefully I’ll be able to subdue with an oil wash later. I sprayed the bare metal parts with Tamiya AS-12 Bare Metal Silver lacquer outside just as it started to sprinkle, reminded me how water and lacquer do not play well together. Silver parts should be fine once I put an acrylic seal and oil wash on them. Other than the control yoke wheel, I’m building this one OOB which makes for a fast moving quick gratification build. Hoping to start detail painting, decaling and assembly of the front & rear cabins tomorrow. Thanks for following along!

Just a year or so ago it was illegal for us to water our lawns and gardens and we were encouraged to collect our “brown water” at the kitchen sink in buckets to flush toilets…..more “global wetting” than global warming here lately. I do look forward to warmer dryer days. I like building shiny car models and have been unable to spray lacquers since October.

Made the following progress today: - Cleaned-up and bonded the two wing and boom assemblies along with the rear elevator, rudders, and ailerons and flaps - trimmed and bonded the six dive brake panels to the wings in a closed position - finished the scratch-built yoke control wheel - primed all the internal parts/ surfaces with Tamiya Fine grey lacquer primer . Weather here has been cool/ light rain but I was able to get an adequate primer application outside by using light coats and spraying between showers. It’s supposed to be very wet weather here in S. CA over the next three days so my plan is to paint (airbrush) the primed parts/ surfaces using Tamiya acrylic paint which, unlike lacquers and enamels, seem to do fine with cooler temps/ humidity. I’ll try to post some progress shots of the cabin and engines as I go this week.

Good to hear I’m not the only one here that spends time on my hands & knees on the garage floor with cell phone flashlight looking for the missing part. It’s getting harder since I hit 70!!!! Enjoying watching your progress on this classic Revell kit. Have loved Mitchell Bombers since that first box scale Revell kit of the 50’s! Would love to build the new HK 1/48 kit if it’s ever on sale for 50% off!

Just joined your audience on this 1/72 Pe-2 build, great job so far and particularly like the paint work you did on those figures. I built the 1/48 version of Zvezda’s PE-2 when it was first released and was really impressed with the level of detail and ease of assembly, highly recommend the 1/48 kit to Pe-2 fans.

Thanks Corsair, makes sense. When you read up on the history of individual P-61 aircraft, it’s amazing how many of them succumbed to fires while still on the ground or taxiing.

A laborious day de-gating most of the parts from the runners. Whomever designed/ built the injection molds for GWH went a little nuts on the size and quantity of molding gates. The two pieces making up the front cockpit entry ladder were particularly overkill gate-wise: I managed to bend and install the very fiddly PE fender bracket for the front landing gear: Here are a group of de-gated parts taped to cardboard and ready for priming: I also like to dry-fit the fuselage and wing assemblies together to get a rough idea of the size of the finished model: I’ll leave with this quandary/ question. The instructions specify the gearbox/ magneto assemblies shown in right in the photo below (with kit supplied magnetos installed) but my understanding is that the P-61B aircraft employed P&W R-2800-65 engines that used gearbox housings similar to the parts shown on the left (also supplied in this kit but with no additional magnetos). In researching this question, I ran across the following image on Eduards website for a resin R-2800 engine intended for the P-61A/B (discontinued by Eduards): So did GWH add this second cylindrical gearbox housing part to the ‘B’ kit to approximate this cylindrical cover over the original R-2800 gearbox? All the other aircraft kits I’ve ever built with R-2800 radials never had this additional cylindrical cover, wonder why it was installed???

Hi Mark, I just checked out your impressive website and your 2019 Widow build, great job! Hoping my efforts here end up half as good as what you able to achieve with this kit.

I roughed out a replacement “wheel” (control yoke) that I think should pass for a correctly sized P-61 wheel. I drilled out .021” OD angled side holes into .080” Evergreen styrene rod and then bent up and CA bonded some .021” florist wire (coated iron?) onto the styrene rod to approximate the shape of the kit supplied Bigfoot wheel. Here’s a photo taken next to the P-38 wheel: Once the CA hardens I’ll clean this up a little more, trim the center shaft to a proper length and add a boss to mate with the vertical yoke member. I enjoy challenges like this to either fix a kit inaccuracy or more commonly for me to reproduce a lost part.

I’m back from our fabulous 15 day luxury sea cruise (South America! Summertime!), have returned home at least 3 kilos heavier and am ready to finally buckle down and show some progress on my twin-engine entry. I started separating the various cockpit components from the runners and assembled the three seats (quite fiddly). GWH loves to put massive gates on small delicate parts so I had to repair fractures on a few of the thinner ones. The control wheel on this kit appears way too large to me and completely out of scale. It’s actually wider than the seat! Here is photo of it taken next to a 1/48 wheel from an Academy P-38 for comparison: In checking one of my references (the Garry R Pape et. al. book I posted above on Jan 12), it doesn’t appear that Northrop used an oversized control wheel that exceeded the width of the seat: I tried modifying the kit wheel to downsize it but ended up mangling it beyond use. I’ll either take a crack at fabricating a similar shape but smaller wheel from scratch or just go with this P-38 wheel…. When I built the initial release of this kit years ago, I remember the front of the canopy not quite fitting flush with the fuselage. It looks like this is still an issue with this version of the kit so I’ll have to apply some filler to address this: That’s about it for today’s progress. I’m leaning towards building “Cooper’s Snooper”. Cheers, John

Thanks Beefy! I didn’t think of cotton, I think that might approach what I’m trying to do if I can minimize the “fuzziness” factor. Worth experimenting with. Is “cling film” the same as Saran wrap/ Glad wrap?

One of my all-time favorite F1 cars, I have fond memories of watching Jody swapping the lead with Mario and Niki in Long Beach in ‘77 (47 years ago!!!! OMG I’m old!!!!). Jody placed 3rd but brilliant drives by all three. When I built my 2010 kit with the box Cartograph decals, they suffered cracking, hopefully this won’t happen to you. I ended up getting replacements from IndyCals. Looking forward to watching your progress.

My wife and I just returned from a very enjoyable sea cruise around the southern end of South America. Our two week cruise included several “sea days” where I was able to observe sea water adjacent to the ship hull as we cruised through open seas at 15 - 20 knots. I took a number of photos of the water and wondered how one might recreate the “lacy/ spider web” water foam effect that I saw on a 1/350 scale diorama: If one had the freehand painting skills, I guess this could be done manually but I’m wondering if anyone knows of other techniques that could be used to achieve this effect? It reminds me somewhat of the “marbling” effect that we’re printed into the inner sleeves of old books (images below from https://www.adelaide.edu.au/library/special/exhibitions/cover-to-cover/marbled-endpapers/) I believe this marble effect was done by applying oil-based paints onto the surface of a water bath and then immersing the paper into the bath to transfer this “oil slick” effect onto the paper. Has anyone ever ran across a non-manual painting technique for achieving this “lacy / spiderweb/ marble” water foam technique onto a gloss acrylic or resin water base on a sea diorama???

The additional plumbing/ wiring you added to this Lotus is amazing. Also love the colors/ heat staining effect on the exhaust headers - how did you do it? All around beautiful A+ work!

I applaud your tenacity Jes in attacking this less-than-perfect kit, doing a great job so far. I love these weird Russian designs, that nose makes this aircraft look like a prop out of an old Buck Rogers two-reeler serial from the 1930’s, looking forward to watching this one come together