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I reviewed this one and went straight on to building it, mainly because I fancied it (in a non-biblical way), so off I went. It's pretty much OOB apart from a few alterations I made to the wing-mounted landing light and due to a few of my own screw-ups, and of course you have to bear in mind that it's a short-ish run kit, which always needs more care and attention to fit and finish than a mainstream kit. It's my first try at an all-over natural metal/silver finish, and I'm reasonably pleased with how it has come out The exhaust staining is perhaps a bit over-done, but I think it adds a bit of drama to the scheme, and the red spinner also helps to lift it a bit too. I chose to paint the gear legs green as an accent, although many examples have silver legs, but green ones are seen. What else? Paints were Gunze, with Alclad white Aluminium as the main shade, which needed straining due to this weird degradation that seems to occur with their metallics, which renders then gritty in the bottle after a few years in stock. Anyway - on to the pics: I'm sure I've probably forgotten a few things, but I'm certain the world won't stop spinning as a result, and as I'm not competitionally inclined, I don't care now I've called time on it You can see the build thread here, and thanks for watching I'll be appearing in an Me.262 ST Group Build here next if you fancy heckling as I go along

I reviewed this puppy a couple of days ago here thanks to @dora(of the Wings variety, not the explorer), and wanted to have a go at putting it together, as with it being a short(ish) run type of moulding, it would be useful to our members to see how it goes together. This type of moulding needs a little more care in construction than your average big-box, stack-em-high type of kit, and preparation of parts is bound to take longer, with test-fitting and fettling an essential part of the model building process. We know all that of course, but it bears repeating just in case some of us aren't familiar with the term I started with the cockpit as per instructions, and have built up a number of assemblies, scraping seams on all the parts, which transforms them and makes construction much easier. There's a shade of mould-slip on a few parts, but nothing too difficult to sort out with just a soupçon of modelling skill and patience. The nose gear bay builds up under the cockpit, so that was done too, as they'll both be interior green, as will the main gear bays etc. Those have just come out of the ultrasonic bath to remove any lingering mould release, which is more likely on short-run kits. Apologies to those that I'm teaching to suck eggs, but not everyone's familiar Anyhoo, while those bits are drying off so I can photograph them, I thought I'd show you a little off-piste non-OOB modelling I've been doing on the leading edge landing light in the port wing. There's a clear part included in the kit, but I wasn't too happy with it, so initially I cut and shaped a piece of 4mm clear acrylic sheet with a view to drilling a shallow hole to represent the light. After a bit of retrospective research on what it actually looked like, I realised the lamp is large and mounted on a flat bulkhead in a square sided enclosure. Back to the drawing board. Version 3 involved squaring off the curved edges of the aperture, building up a little 3-sided box with a recess for a 3mm self-adhesive cabochon (a what?) that's often used in dress-making for rhinestones and sparkly bits, but also looks very like a scale light that some companies sell to modellers at inflated prices I bought a few sheets off eBay in various sizes for a couple of quid for a few hundred of the little blighters. Money-saving tip of the day I also drilled a few holes in the side walls, just like the real thing. That's about the only deviation I'm planning apart from any losses or breakages, which I'll come to later! That's where we're at right now, and that little assembly will be painted up after being glued into the closed up wing (post painting of the wheel bays & their insertion). The cabochons in the foreground will be glued into the recess you can see, as I don't want to rely on the adhesive, in case it falls off later on and rattles around. I was tossing around the idea of using a clear piece of acetate or @woody37's idea of using a piece of sellotape, but as I've got to make good the curved edge, I'll use the acetate block and mask the shape of the outer cover so it looks proper. That would be tricky with tape, and could look a bit of a mess. The cockpit went together ok, apart from the control column pinging out of my tweezers, hitting my shoulder and totally disappearing. I've nabbed one from an Eduard P-39, and will cross that bridge when/if I come to it later I also lost the handle on a lever on the right of the cockpit floor, so I made up a new one from a piece of rod that I sanded to a handle-shape & glued on. I think the nose gear bay sides need a bit of fettling before I close up the fuselage, as they're holding it a little wide, and contributing to a fit issue I've discovered/made for myself on the wing root. I'll talk more about that later on when I've glued the fuselage and wings into their separate assemblies. You might remember that the intake on the spine of the aircraft was an insert, but beware - there are two in the box! Guess how I found out? Yep - fettled and glued the wrong one in! I pulled it off the next day and glued the correct one into each half of the fuselage, and for avoidance of doubt it's the one with the hole in the rear face that you put a bit of mesh over. That's fitted fairly well after a bit of fettling, and I will smooth it out properly during the fuselage closing process. The main gear bays fit inside the wings with a bit of sanding down of the mould edge flairs, but I wanted to be absolutely certain they weren't going to baulk the closure of the wings later on, so I scribbled on their backs with marker pen, then dry assembled the wings. Where the marker had transferred to the top wing I scraped off a bit of styrene with the side of a curved blade until fit was nice and loose. It's more of a precaution than anything, as I hate having to adjust parts after I've spent ages painting them. While I was test fitting the fuselage halves together, I decided to test-fit the nose insert, which has the two cannon ports in the top. Fit straight off the sprue was pretty bad in fairness, but was a bit better once I'd removed any moulding artifacts and flash. It's still going to need a blob of filler here and there, but it's far from unbuildable! I'll get that squared away once the fuselage is glued together, while I work on that wing root. I'm not 100% sure what's going on there, but once the parts aren't slopping around due to being taped together, I'll be able to get a better handle on it and formulate some sort of plan for dealing with it. Happy days! I'll take a few snaps of the cockpit, wheel bays & such once they're dry.

Dora Wings is asking/collecting informations about the Morane Saulnier MS.230. For 1/72nd and 1/48th kits? Time wil tell. Source: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2161911817372717&id=1929101897320378 V.P.

Bell P-63E KingCobra (48004) 1:48 Dora Wings The P-39 Airacobra was deemed to be a damp squib by the US, although the Russian pilots thought well of it, as it suited their needs, but Bell tried to improve the aircraft by basing their attempts on the more suitable P-39E with a redesigned wing, engine and the inclusion of a supercharger that was omitted from the original Airacobra in order to save money, which inevitably affected high altitude performance. The resulting airframe was so much different and noticeably larger, so was renamed and given the designation P-63A by the military, who ordered it into production toward the end of 1942, which was the main in-service variant. In an attempt to improve performance it progressed to the D variant, which was the basis for the P-63E, but with a return to the cab-door canopy, and a ventral fin extension to improve stability. One 13 Es were built, and the project stuttered to a halt from there with a large number of airframes seeing out their days in Soviet and French service, plus a few air racers using modified surplus airframes. The Kit Dora Wings is a new company to us, and have kindly agreed to send us some samples for review. There have been a few kits in 1:48 of this aircraft, but nothing much in the recent past until Dora Wings popped up with the unusually configured TP-63E two-seat KingCobra, closely followed by this boxing with a single-seat fighter, and the soon-to-be-released Racer based on an A model with clipped wings. The box is small, but inside are a lot of sprues – eight in grey styrene, one in clear, a copper coloured sheet of Photo-Etch (PE), masks and of course decal sheet. The instructions are loose-bound and printed on matt stock in colour, with the painting and markings guide loose in the centre. This has the feeling of a short-run kit by nature, but in terms of detail and quality, it is more of a longer-run and the parts are well-moulded with only the sprues themselves looking a bit old-skool. The cockpit is first to be built up, and it is well-appointed with basic sidewall detail moulded into the fuselage, PE parts and a set of PE seatbelts. The nose gear bay is built up under the cockpit, and the gear leg is trapped between the sides of the bay at this early stage, leaving it a little vulnerable to the clumsy modeller. Before the fuselage is even introduced the instructions have you installing the wheel bays in the full-span lower wing, adding the intakes to the leading edge wingroots, and building up the gear. The upper wings drop onto the lower wing leaving a slot for the fuselage, which has its dorsal intake insert and PE grille added, plus a throttle quadrant before it is closed up around the cockpit/nose gear bay and the exhausts are added just aft of the cockpit door. A twin .50cal gun insert is fitted to the nose, and the wings are mated along with the flaps and ailerons, then the elevators, and lastly the rudder. The canopy is two parts with cut-outs for the car-door style windows in the forward section, and completely clear doors, which will need masking inside and out. The gear is installed, the nose gear bay doors added with separate hinges, and the prop, with integral 37mm M4 cannon muzzle is built up and inserted into the nose. You then have a choice of things to hang under the wings from a conformal fuel tank, wing tanks on short pylons, central tank, and underwing mounted machine-gun pods that housed a pair of .50cals. Markings As Henry Ford wouldn't have said, it's any colour you like as long as it's Aluminium. For most of the reference photos I've seen that appears to be a painted finish, but do check your references before plundering on. Decals are printed on off-white paper by Decograph of Ukraine, and are in good registration, sharpness and colour density, with a thin matt carrier film cut close to the printed areas. They also include an instrument panel printed in black and white with all the dials present. From the box you can build one of the following: US Air Force s/n 43-11720 – silver with black anti-glare panel and red spinner. US Air Force s/n 43-11721 – silver with black anti-glare panel and silver spinner. US Air Force s/n 43-11727 – silver with black anti-glare panel and red spinner. Civil registration N9993R – silver with black anti-glare panel and red spinner that tapers back along the fuselage. Fuerza Aerea Hondurena FAH – 402 Honduran Air Force, Tepucigalpa, 1948 – Honduran flag on tail and wingtips. Fuerza Aerea Hondurena FAH – 401 Honduran Air Force, Tepucigalpa, 1948 – Honduran flag on tail and wingtips. The Honduran flags are provided as decals, and prop stencils are also included, but you will have to paint the prop tips and the tapering red stripe down the side of option 4 yourself, which is probably for the best for colour matching with the spinner. Colour call-outs are made with Humbrol codes as well as the colour names, all of which are suitably generic, so easily converted to your favourite manufacturer. Supplied on a sheet of grey vinyl, the pre-cut masks supply you with a full set of masks for the canopy, with compound curves at the rear handled by using frame hugging masks, while the highly curved gaps are in-filled with either liquid mask or from tape. Conclusion The P-63 came along at a time when the attention was focused more on the nascent jet age, so it gathered little attention, and many folks probably couldn't even tell the difference between it and the P-39 unless they were side-by-side. That said, it's an appealing aircraft, and as a model it looks like it will go together pretty well. It's a shame there weren't more variations on colour schemes, but as there were only a few airframes built in this configuration, it's hardly surprising. Highly recommended. Review sample courtesy of

Source: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2106721216225111&id=1929101897320378 For my part a 1/48th FD.2 please... V.P.

The first completed model from Dora Wings.

Project fighter based on GeeBee R-2. Used reworked plastic Testors. The hood, engine, landing gear and canopy Dora Wings. The machine guns Browning are Master Models 1/32.