Hasegawa 1/48 P-40E

jeaton01 · August 24, 2018

Another P-40 finished.

The markings are for a P-40E-1 flown in the defense of Darwin by RAAF F/L Les Jackson. Schuftie is Arabic for "have a closer look". I have made it a habit to make two sliding canopy sections, one vacuform for posing with an open cockpit and the other the kit canopy for closed cockpit photos. The kit canopy seldom rests right in the open position. The masks required are quite different. On the Squadron canopy the left and right sides are also different, and there was no upper longitudinal framing at all. Those masks were made by photographing the canopies, tracing over them in Autocad, and cutting them with a Silhouette Cameo vinyl cutter. There are always adjustments to be made so paper patterns are printed and tried until everything is happy. The decals came from the ProModeler P-40E kit and look nice when done but took very careful handling to keep them from breaking up. A few required touch up. The bead sight is made of fine music wire, I despaired of ever holding on to the plastic part long enough to clean up the sprue gate remains, and it immediately flung itself into space anyway. Easier anyway to super glue in the wire and cut it to length when the glue is cured.

Tamiya Light Sea Grey was used on the bottom, with Model Master Acryl for the Dark Earth, and Tamiya Dark Green RAF (2). I find the Acryl paints rather fragile but this time it worked OK and sprayed very nicely. You would think the paint manuafacturers would all have these colors right by now, I hope they are close to correct for this highly discerning crowd.

Here is a link to a pdf of the wrap-around masks I made for British pattern camouflage for the short tail P-40's from the P-40D on. A jpg of the pattern is at the end of the photos.

http://goldeneramodel.com/mymodels/p40/3p40/0113ap40.html