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1/48 Airfix P-40B - FINISHED


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Hello all,

 

Having just finished my HobbyBoss Ta152C-11 and with the mojo flowing freely I decided to start on one of the newer additions to the stash:

 

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(Apologies to Scalemates; I thought I had my own picture but evidently not.)

 

This kit will be painted in the colours of 112 Squadron RAF in the North African campaign of 1941.  It's a bit of an easy target, I suppose (along with the also-ubiquitous Flying Tigers schemes which also proliferate).  There's a vague plan to at some point build a P-40E in the scheme of Dennis Copping's aircraft that remained undiscovered in the desert for many years, and this may be a dummy run for that project.

 

I've got seatbelts coming, courtesy of Eduard, and also have their Brassin wheel set.  Quickboost exhausts, airscrew and air intake will complete the build. 

 

This afternoon I was able to do some basic assembly of cockpit parts and a bit of interior airbrushing.  So far I've found a little more flash than I'd expect, although nothing too terrible to cope with.  The detail looks pretty reasonable and although the plastic is very much of its time (soft!) I can't see it bringing any unpleasant issues.  I agonised over the correct colour for the interior but in the end I used Colourcoats' US Interior Green:

 

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Usually I don't get too carried away with the cockpit interior as it irks me that you can put so much work into the least-visible area of the airframe, but on this build I think I'll have a tilt at giving it a reasonable amount of detailing.  We shall see how much I can stick to this idea!

 

Cheers,

 

JRK

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1 hour ago, PlaStix said:

Hi JRK. I haven't built one of these yet, so I will follow your progress with interest. :popcorn:

Kind regards,

Stix

 

Thanks Stix; if the bloomin' seatbelts ever arrived I might be able to get on with the build!

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In order to prove that I am at least doing something in P-40 terms, here's a wee 1/72 Trumpeter P-40B that I'm also building at the same time.  The kit's pretty basic to say the least, but I'm not fussed about that.  I plan to have it in VVS colours, covered in white distemper, which I'm hoping will hide the multitude of sins.

 

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Normal (i.e. 1/48) service will be resumed shortly.

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Recently did a KP La-5 with winter camo, and used AMMO Washable white out of curiosity. 
As it says on the bottle, you can wash it off with water, or once completely dry, polish it off partly to good effect. 

 

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9 hours ago, alt-92 said:

Recently did a KP La-5 with winter camo, and used AMMO Washable white out of curiosity. 
As it says on the bottle, you can wash it off with water, or once completely dry, polish it off partly to good effect. 

 

 

Thanks, that's good to know.  I was considering option for how to do the white coat, and will have a go with some of this.  It sounds like it might come in handy, especially as I have a pair of Bf109's (an F and a G) that I'd like to show in winter camouflage somewhere in the middle of my stash.

 

9 hours ago, bigbadbadge said:

When I first saw the image of the 72nd build I thought crikey he did that quick thinking is was the 48th one.  Good to see you are keeping yourself busy whilst waiting. 

Winter camouflage will be interesting. 

Chris

 

Ha, thanks Chris, unfortunately not, although once I can get the belts in I'll be able to cement the cockpit together fully and get the fuselage halves closed up and we should see some (hopefully reasonably rapid) progress.  I have weathered the cockpit parts with a whole heap of desert sand so it's not all bad.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hallelujah, the seatbelts have finally landed.  As always, there's a saga; once it had become apparent after about two weeks that Royal Fail had lost the first set, I bought a second.  For some reason this took the seller (who is normally very reliable) more than a week to post the replacements, which led us nicely into the Christmas period.  Anyway, to cut a long story short, the second set arrived yesterday - I have no idea where the first set are, and neither do the seller (who is very exasperated because RM managed to lose everything he posted that day) or Royal Mail themselves.

 

I had a bit of a lie-in this morning, as my traditional NYD mountain walking was cancelled, but then got on with the P-40b.

 

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Seatbelts in and a lot of sand blowing around the place.

 

 

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A bit more muck and yuck strewn around the place.  This isn't going to be a very tidy office.

 

 

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The fit of the cockpit internals isn't too bad; there's a bit to be sorted but nothing major.  The sidewall frames are perhaps a bit clunky, but once the canopy is on I don't think it'll be much of an issue.

 

 

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Slightly more annoying is the welter of fit problems at the pointy end; once the cement is 100% cured it'll be a case of filling and sanding until things look a bit tidier.

 

Cheers,

 

JRK

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This kit is taking me back to my youth, and not in a good way.  Being a fairly recent tooling (2016) I was expecting the fit to be pretty good but have been met with dodgy wing roots and undercarriage pivot fairings which have had to be butchered into place.  Both of these are going to require some filling and grinding in order to make them behave.  The wings are also less than sublime, with leading edges that will need plenty of attention and as for the trailing edges...  They're about 75 scale millimetres thick.  I'm not sure of the best way to go about thinning them down, so any tips will be gratefully received.  Oh, and the spine seam is more of a step than a seam.  Still, that's easily sorted I suppose.  There is also a canyon down the centre of the chin panel.  Sigh, more filling!

 

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Cheers,

 

JRK

 

 

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G'day Jack,I had the same problem with the wing trailing edges on my Airfix 1/48th Hurricane and the rudder on my Heller 1/48th Rafale.What I did was glue them together and then carefully take a wide kerf saw blade through them which,while time consuming,did most of the thinning and only needed a little cleaning up.

 

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Hope this is of use.

Edited by Alex Gordon
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2 minutes ago, Alex Gordon said:

G'day Jack,I had the same problem with the wing trailing edges on my Airfix 1/48th Hurricane and the rudder on my Heller 1/48th Rafale.What I did was glue them together and then carefully take a wide kerf saw blade through them which,while time consuming,did most of the thinning and only needed a little cleaning up.

 

Heller-Rafale-A-37.jpg

 

Hope this

 

 

Thanks very much for the tip - I'll have to find a suitable saw blade and give that a go. 

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Seeing as I've got covid some unexpected time off, I thought I'd get on with the filling and sanding.  I started with this:

 

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And I ended up with this:

 

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Good, eh?

#

Well, no, not really.  Between the first picture and the last there's a gap of some four hours.  Filling, sanding, filling, sanding etc followed filling, sanding, filling and sanding.  I used three types of filler on the chin panel without success.  I could NOT get than line to smooth out no matter what I did to it.  In the end I gave up and sluiced it with CA and dumped a load of baking soda onto it.  Then I sanded some more.....  Anyhow, you can see the join line due to paint being in there, but I can't feel it at all now, so it can stay like it.

 

The next job is to fill the cavernous join lines around the wing tips.  Oh joy.

 

However, there is some good news - Junior is finished:

 

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Cheers,

 

JRK

 

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Sitting at home with Covid does have some fringe benefits, it seems.  The hours of boredom and the being ill are the downsides, but getting the odd squirt of paint on this kit is a positive.

 

I've never black-based a kit before, so I thought I'd give it a try with this kit.  The "black" base coat was my first mistake; I used tyre black and in retrospect there was perhaps not enough contrast with the white, but hey, I've learned something.  As you'll see for the photos, it's not great but I think it will prove to be sufficient for a first try.  I should also perhaps have used my 0.2 airbrush rather than my 0.35, but I'm not going to beat myself up about it too much.

 

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As I said above, I think that some more contrast would be better, so next time I'll use a blacker shade of black. 

 

The next job is to spray the undersides azure blue, and following that, (once the Big H have delivered my masks) the dark earth / mid stone uppers.  I'm glad to report that mojo levels remain high and I'm keen to get cracking.

 

Cheers,

 

JRK

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I wouldn't worry about your choice of colour for the black because once you start to lightly apply the Azure blue and blend it all together it will look fine 🙂👍

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11 minutes ago, Andy J said:

I wouldn't worry about your choice of colour for the black because once you start to lightly apply the Azure blue and blend it all together it will look fine 🙂👍

 

That's what I'm hoping!

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Following a very inspiring Teams meeting (yes, I know, I was surprised to find they exist, too!) this afternoon I've just finished applying the azure blue to the undersides of the Tomahawk:

 

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This isn't the greatest picture, thanks to it being taken on an ancient iPhone, and the paint is still damp in it, but you get the gist.  I'm pretty happy with how it turned out and will post a better picture when the paint is dry.  Unfortunately, I've just realised that I forgot to spray the bloomin' undercarriage fairings and wheel covers and have just finished putting all the spraying gear away after cleaning it.....!  Oh well, next time I have the airbrush out I'll get to it.

 

Cheers,

 

JRK

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A bit more progress; yesterday was spent mostly batting the Matchbox Meteor into shape (oh, as well as getting carried away and pre-ordering things from Airfix....) so today I was keen to get on with the P-40.  I put the Dark Earth on a couple of days ago  but didn't post a picture because it was just a half blue, half brown airframe with nothing much to make it interesting.  The DE went down very well and I was optimistic that the Middle Stone would go the same way.

 

Initially I had trouble with getting the Top Notch masks to adhere to the surface, which was both unexpected and annoying; after a bit of head-scratching I decided that this was probably down to the slight texturing that was caused by all the pre-shading plus the DE coat.  The addition of some Tamiya tape and blue tack soon sorted this problem, in any case, so I got my Dark Green paint out and started spraying.  Seen the mistake yet?!

 

Fortunately I realised what I'd done and cleaned the airbrush out before mixing up some MS and then got spraying.

 

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There are a couple of bits that need some tidying up but nothing to dramatic.  I'll get to these once this coat is dry.

 

Cheers,

 

JRK

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Houston, we have a problem....

 

I've come to the decalling and have run into problems.  The Kitsworld decals are brilliant but don't come with roundels or fin flashes, for some reason.  No problem, says I, I'll nick some from another kit.  This was a while ago, and I can't remember where I sourced the roundels from (it was some type of Airfix kit) but have a look at this picture and see if you can see the problem:

 

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Fortunately, I knew the upper wing roundels wouldn't be a problem as I had some spares; unfortunately they've turned out to be Xtradecals ones and are about three feet thick....

 

I'm off to hunt in the loft for some underwing roundels that are the right size.

 

Grrrr!

 

JRK

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Oh, maybe we don't have a problem; I've done a bit of 'net searching and it looks like the smaller underwing roundels might be correct.  If anyone has any further ideas about this I'd love to hear them (before I put the matt coat on!

 

It looks like I only need fin flashes now.

 

Cheers,

 

JRK

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I hoped to get all of the painting done today but was foiled on two fronts:

 

1 - I still haven't been able to decide whether or not to paint the fin flashes or buy some decals;

2 - I got a bit out of sequence and have had to leave the spinner until tomorrow.

 

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Still, we're getting there.

 

Cheers,

 

JRK

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5 hours ago, DigDoug said:

I gave up when I got to the fit issues with the nose and the wings.

After I'd assembled the fuselage it occurred to me that I could probably have made things easier by deviating from the instructions and fitting the nose inserts to the individual fuselage halves first, which would have made lining them up a lot easier.  Ah well, hindsight, eh?!

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