P-61B Black Widow IHobbyBoss 1/72)

[Scargsy]

So for the GB I'll be attempting this kit:

Seems I have a love for odd looking, twin boom / twin bodied aircraft, so this will be in fine company with my recently built and similarly black F-82 Twin Mustang. 

I've got a few after market bits - a set of Print Scale decals, plus some Eduard canopy masks and their small interior PE kit.

In terms of Journey's End, according to Wikipedia:

Quote

Historian Warren Thompson wrote that "it is widely believed" that the last enemy aircraft destroyed in combat before the Japanese surrender was downed by a P-61B-2 named "Lady in the Dark" (s/n 42-39408) of the 548th NFS.[23] The aircraft piloted by Lieutenant Robert W. Clyde and R/O Lieutenant Bruce K. LeFord on 14/15 August 1945 claimed a Nakajima Ki-44 "Tojo." The destruction of the "Tojo" came without a shot being fired; after the pilot of the "Tojo" sighted the attacking P-61, he descended to wave-top level and began a series of evasive maneuvers. These ended with his aircraft striking the water and exploding. Clyde and LeFord were never officially credited with this possible final kill of the war.

So I might do that decal option from the pack or maybe "Cooper's Snooper" (P-61B-2 42-39454 flown by 1 Lt George C Cooper, 548th NFS, Iwo Jima, Spring 1945) since I like the look of the nose art.

 

I've got 3 other GB builds to do first, so you might have to wait a while for the sprue shots and build start!

 

 

[Wez]

I love the Black Widow, a very capable and advanced aircraft, I remember making the Airfix kit when I was about 8, so that's a mighty long time ago now!

 

Interested to see how this one turns out, good luck with the build and welcome to the GB.

[AaronKSJ]

I'm going to tag along, got a soft spot for the P-61

 

[ArnoldAmbrose]

On 5/29/2020 at 1:42 AM, AaronKSJ said:

got a soft spot for the P-61

Ditto.

 

Gidday Scargsy, I did the Airfix kit about twelve months ago, the "Lady in the Dark" you mentioned above. Although I'm mainly a ship builder I have a penchant for the big twin-engined fighters of WW2. I'm looking forward to seeing how yours turns out. Regards, Jeff.

[Scargsy]

So I started the build, firstly the kit comes in a fairly sturdy box with separate lid.

I'm not overly sure what HobbyBoss mean by 'Easy Assembly' but there aren't too many parts, and there's some nice interlocking connection points e.g. between the upper and lower wing parts, which should help with alignment. I'm not complaining about low part count, I often think kit manufacturers these days seem to equate quantity of parts with quality.

The instruction booklet is fairly sparse, only an unlucky 13 steps but it's in a nice big format.

There's a nice separate double sided colour paint/decal diagram - possibly not overly appropriate with an all over black paint scheme but nice to have for the decals, etc.

There's actually a separate little baggy with the small non-common decals, that's probably due to the fact this kit comes in 3 variants and the big decals will be common.

All the other parts come individually bagged, except for the multiples which are in packaged together which is always nice, and the clear parts come in some nice foamy packaging too - well I think that's the clear parts as I haven't opened it yet (in case I scratch them) and haven't seen them anywhere else!

The aftermarket stuff, I've only opened the PE parts so far (not the masks), though the decals you can see through the packet, also the tiny brass PE on the right came with the kit (I think it's for some antenna).

The PE has a multi-colour instruction sheet...

After being excited to start this 'easy' kit I immediately hit a problem on instruction 1 and the kit almost hit the wall

The small intake parts (radiator grills?) didn't want to fit at all along the leading edge of the wing, I ended up sanding some raised injector pin marks on the inside of the wing and having to shave off quite a bit of the raised connection points on the parts to get them to key into the appropriate slots.

I eventually got them to fit, but at this point I decided to take extra care to test the fitment as can be seen above - the lower fuselage part though fitted amazingly well along the underside wing portion.

I also tested the upper wing fit and this too seemed to align well.

Next up I decided to do some priming of the interior parts - I used a dirty mix of Vallejo 'plate mail' and 'bronze green' primers which I felt was a nice initial coat - it's got a bit of a metallic sheen, a little dark but it's just an initial coat. After that I gave it a rough coat of interior green mixed with a small amount of the metal primer and some glazing medium (to give a bit of opacity).

Whilst that was drying I decided to start on one of the booms, my plan was to build it up but leave the undercarriage off till post painting however it appeared that wasn't going to be an easy fit and the undercarriage seemed a bit flimsy so along with the fact this kit needs a huge 20g of front ballast to stop it tail sitting, I decided instead I'd model it in flight.

Well that might have been a bad idea, the doors needed a whole load of fettling, whittling, sanding, etc. before they'd sit in nicely. On the plus side the top part of the boom sub-assembly is open at that point so that made things a little easier. I left the other boom to do for later, after all the faffing about I fancied getting on with something else.

I started on the PE, not my favourite thing (especially using super-glue which inevitably doesn't want to stick the parts I want together but is magically attracted to my fingers!)

I didn't do the full lot: 1/72 individual throttle levers per engine that were included seems more like masochism than fun to me, plus I'll probably mess up the canopy so no-one will see any of this anyway

I started assembly but seemed to hit a problem - the instrument panel seemed to make the side panels sit a bit too far back, where they appeared they wouldn't fit - I was unsure if the instrument panel should have been fitted to the rear of the alignment points so repositioned it there but in hindsight I think it's possibly because of the extra PE and the fact I didn't completely sand back everything behind it, just the detail). 

My first time with 1/72 PE seatbelts (usually 1/24 car ones are about my limit), so I think they came out OK, the radar operators station seemed to come out quite nicely, fairly simple parts with just the handles to bend out. Yes there's a sink mark in the bottom of the fuselage and some rather rough cuts on the PE (e.g. the top right unit) but at scale it looks nice - the top two boxes, according to the instructions had extra handles (as separate parts) to attach to the centre of them - well beyond my level of comfort, let alone attempt!

I glued the lower fuselage and lower wing first (there's a bit of a 'click' connection on the back of the radar operators cabin wall) so I could get a good alignment, then attached the upper wing and inserted the gunner and radar operator seats and decided to leave it all to fully set. I'd also added the nose cone, since it seemed it would help the alignment of the upper and lower halves. Oddly it has the pitot tube moulded onto it, which I'm worried is one of those parts just itching to get knocked off during construction!

 

[CliffB]

Nice work with cockpit Scargsy 

 

Cheers

[Thom216]

Agree, that 'pit is looking good.

 

[Vaastav]

That looks excellent. Very neat cockpit.