Great Wall Hobby P-40

[Chaotic Mike]

Hello everybody.

 

I am taking time off from my ever-increasing collection of 1/32 Hawker single seat piston fighters to do the Great Wall Hobby P-40.  It is staggeringly comprehensive, so far I have concluded that after-market is pretty much entirely redundant.  It comes with a great deal of interior detail within the body of the fuselage, I am considering indulging in a bit of surgery to skeletonize parts of the body, this may come to naught if I chicken out!

 

The plastic is a change from what I have working with most recently (Special Hobby and Fly) - it is distinctly harder and more brittle, something that can be seen on the sprues where a few of the injection moulded engine pipes have snapped.  Probably a job for wire anyway when I get that far into it.

 

The 'Curtiss Green' is an eye-balled mix based on taking some Tamiya IJN cockpit green, then adding blue and yellow in proportions suggested by GWH for Gunze paints.  On with the pics:

 

  

 

Those dials are individual decals.  I punched them out.  Very tedious.  You might see traces of green, that's because the instructions were silent on the colour of the IP whilst saying everything else in the general area was green.  So I painted it green, applied decals, discovered lots of references showing it to be black, and repainted with the decals in situ.  Laugh? I nearly started.

 

A couple of views of the built up cockpit tub:

 

 

 

The moulding and fit is first rate - easily up there with Tamiya.

 

The seat - OK I lied about aftermarket.  I acquired a 3D-printed Sutton Harness, because I am going to be modelling this as a slightly inaccurate P-40 from the Desert Air Force, so I needed to replace the supplied American harness with a UK version.

 

 

 

  And that's where things rest ATM.  I'm going to take a leisurely approach to this build - the kit is too good to get carried away and start slapping stuff together!

 

Mike

[Chaotic Mike]

There's a bit of weathering and grubbiness in this cockpit's future! 

[Chaotic Mike]

A week or so has passed; "What's going on?", as Marvin Gaye put it so eloquently half a century ago...

 

Mainly, I have been building an interior, weathering it, and then sealing it up so that it will never be seen again.  Consider the following exhibits, m'lud...

 

 

 

 

Now, the first error I have met so far.  Take a look at this snippet from the instructions:

 

You see part E39?  If you put it in there, you cannot subsequently close the fuselage, because it interferes with a frame that sits in front of it.  Instead, you need to cement it to the frame so that it is kind of floating in space a bit, waiting on the fuselage closing up at which point it finds itself nestling snugly on the inner wall of the starboard side.

 

Of course, once the fuselage is closed up it is nigh on invisible.  🙂

 

Now a quick exposition on GWH's moulding skills.  Here are a few little pipes that get installed into the wheel wells.  Check out the (lack of) size of these little doofers...

 

 

Once they have been sanded down, pained dark aluminium and placed in the wheel bays, they look like this:

 

 

GWH's plastic is quite brittle.  When I get on to building the engine, later, we will encounter many impossibly thin extrusions of polystyrene that sadly have snapped in transit.  I am trying to repair those that I can whilst they are on the frames - typically there will be a pipe that has snapped, but whose halves are still on the frames so the frame makes a convenient jig for holding the pieces exactly the correct distance apart to enable butt joints.  But with a gluing surface area being a small fraction of a millimetre, I'm not holding out a great deal of hope - I'm expecting to replicate a fair few of the hoses in solder, fuse wire, and anything else that is malleable and approximately the right size.

 

Th-th-th-th-th-that's all for now, folks....

 

[ernestf]

Great project so far ! thanks for sharing and I am following with great interest.

 

Ernest

[Chaotic Mike]

A little bit of progress, after a trip to the RAF museum caused me to visit the London outreach branch of the big 'H'.  A nice man talked me into buying all manner of exotic tools (well, OK, ball bearings for paint mixing and extra low tack tape, oh, and a 1/32 Trumpeter P-38...) but after I got home I did a bit of light internals on the P-40.

 

 

GWH have you build the control column and ?a brake lever? onto the wing surface, along with what is probably an actuator for the guns (the black hose, which is a replacement piece of wire because of the aforementioned fragility issues on the moulded hoses).  The seat is supposed to drop in from the top after the wing is fixed to the fuselage, but this method is distinctly easier.

 

The build order gets a bit funny, here.  The instructions would have you turn the wing over, and then get down and dirty folding photoetch to construct the interiors of the flaps.  The thing is, with those levers poking up from the upper surface, clearly those delicate little pieces will be at significant risk of being knocked off.  Instead, I will attach the wings to the fuselage when things have settled, so that these bits of cockpit will be securely protected by the body of the plane.  It will also be the last time I get to look at my AK-interactive-weathering-effects-powered wear and tear before it is sealed up, never to be seen again.  This kit makes Zoukei-Mura look under-engineered!

 

Ciao... 

 

[Troy Smith]

On 29/01/2023 at 18:14, Chaotic Mike said:

 

  And that's

The wrong way round.  The strap holes should be on the seat side.

Don't know if that still tweakable? 

HTH 

[Chaotic Mike]

Thanks Troy. Yes, still tweakable! I've looked at lots of pictures of Sutton harnesses, including some on our favourite modelling site, and I remain totally unsure how the thing works! The effect I was going for is the straps just hanging over the seat back, waiting to be pulled over the pilot's shoulders... Would that not be correct?  Later pics that I haven't shared show them dangling negligently in space! 

 

Mike

[Chaotic Mike]

And then I saw @bigbadbadge's Hurricane, and all became clear. 

[bigbadbadge]

Glad it helped Mike, this looks great,  what a very detailed kit, looking forward to seeing this develope.

Chris

[Chaotic Mike]

For the past few weeks, I have been wrangling my personal bete-noire, which is photo-etch.  And this kit has *lots* of photo-etch.  I have acquired Basingstoke Hobbycraft's last remaining tube of GS-Hypo, which I am finding to be a great solution for those parts that offer a largish surface area that can be clamped, but not so great for tiny fiddly thin parts (such as what you are about to see, in the flap cavities, where Rocket extra-thin seems to be the order of the day.  All I *really* want is a high tack, viscous, instantaneous glue...  it appears that high tack and cyanoacrylate are mutually exclusive, which is a shame.  *Excellent* fumes from the GS-Hypo, though, so its not all bad!

 

The pics...

 

This is a typical flap bay.  Each of those bits of PE rib is actually a fairly complicated fold of teeny-weeny pieces, that leaves a microscopically narrow cementing area.  And although they all look the same IRL they aren't, there are several lengths to be coped with and put into the correct place.  I cant help feeling that these areas could have been injected moulded without anyone being too upset!

 

 

 

Still, I got there.  In the next shots, you can see all the ribs installed, painted green and in receipt of a dose of Citadel Earthshade wash, which makes things pop.  You can also see a raft of tubing, all of which is spectacularly well moulded and which fits with absolute precision.  On the starboard wing, you can see PE doors that cover up where ammo boxes (which are provided) get installed, never to be seen again.  I left them out...  On the other side, I will leave the doors open, allowing a view of a small proportion of the (again, exquisitely moulded) machine guns, which would otherwise be invisible.  

 

 

And, in what we are going to see is a continuing theme with this build, I have dry fit the flaps themselves and the belly fairing, to demonstrate the futility of existence the glorious fit that has been achieved by GWH's mould makers.  

 

 

 

So far a *VERY* trouble free kit.  In the flap bays, there are 2 squares of PE that are identical, that should be mirror images.  But it's fine, flip one over and attack it with a riveter, no one will tell!

 

Cheers then...

 

Mike

 

 

[Chaotic Mike]

2 months later, what do I have to show?  I have stalled, because I appear to be losing use of my right hand, due either to a bad reaction to statins, or as as-yet-undiagnosed neck trauma.  It's a total bitch.  Things I cannot do very well at the moment (some of which I used to be quite good at...)

• Work an airbrush
• Hold a pen, and write
• Use a table knife (forks are OK, though)
• Chop vegetables
• Play bass guitar in Basingstoke's finest post-teenage rocking combo, 'The Zone' (available on Spotify; just sayin')
• Change gear and put any kind of pressure onto my road bike's front brake

I stopped the statins and there is slight improvement, but I get the impression that the outer half of my right hand doesn't entirely belong to me.  Currently I'm waiting to get the results of an NMR scan of my neck, and a nerve conductivity test.

So the P-40 is stalled at the priming stage.  Bugrit.

 

Mike