1/32 Pacific Coast Models Macchi 202

Brad · September 9, 2020

I bought this kit quite a long time ago, I think it was one of the first LSP's I bought. I did so because it was 69 bucks, at the time I thought it was a bargain for a large scale Macchi 202. The I tried building it and found out why there weren't many builds of this kit around. What I remember from doing the interior is it required sanding down the inside of the fuselage a lot to make the resin fit. I got finished doing this, turned towards the wheel wells and that's where I stopped.

Years past with this kit sitting in the shelf of doom. The pile of dust on it was quite impressive. It almost hit he bin a few times, the only reason it didn't was because I'd hate to have wasted 69 bucks. I picked it up last month and decided come hell or high water I would finish it. The wheel wells that proved difficult to fit were thrown in the bin, I then progressively glued together the bottom wing to fuselage, then gear doors were put into place followed by the upper wing sections. Those did not fit well and all of the wing to fuselage joint area has been sanded and shaved heavily then rescribed to get a decent fit.

The resin oil cooler was too small to fit the hole in the resin lower cowling, itself being slightly undersize. Some sanding of the plastic helped with fit here. Radiator was fine and the tail was average but some basic filling and sanding here fixed that. I did get stuck for a while with the canopy, windscreen and spinner. The spinner is too small for the backplate, this was just sanded to fit, which makes it slightly undersize, but oh well. I had to take a lot of plastic off the fuselage to get the windscreen and canopy anywhere close to fitting.

I decided for the colours, I liked the profile of one of the around 20 Croatian machines used on the Russian Front. The pictures of these machines are not the best, so I just guessed at what the markings might be, figuring German insignia was most likely with the Croat shield in place of the swastika to make things a little different (but this kind of thing was done with at least 1 POA machine). Markings came form the spares box along with the pilot.