Flying Tigers P-40B Warhawk

[Don Boose]

This all looks good, and the fillets appear to be perfect - always a very difficult part of the constructions.

At first I thought that the inner landing gear doors were reversed, but now I see that they conform to the curve of the housing. http://www.aircraftresourcecenter.co...l/P40view1.jpg (the image is of an E model u/c, but works for the B/C as well, I think).

It looks like all the hard work and aggravation are paying off.

Don

[palindrome]

Yeah. the landing gear doors are weird.

When I had all those problems with the cockpit, I went and bought a copy of both volumes of In Detail & Scale for the P-40 (Part 1, Part 2). Part 1 has a TON of useful pictures for modeling the AVG Warhawk.

FWIW, the fillets aren't perfect; the camouflage lines don't match up exactly. But if you can't see that in the pictures, it's clearly good enough

[milenio3]

Again, you're doing a pretty good job on this model.

And I agree with Rockpaperscissor... a Halinski will be a breeze for you, that's for sure!

[palindrome]

Heh. Halinski has a Flying Tigers P-40E that I'm considering buying (along with a number of other Halinskis). The Flying Tigers upgraded to the P-40E after the US entered the war and the AVG was integrated into the USAAF as the 23rd Fighter Group. I need to get better at working with small parts before I do a Halinski kit. My next project will be a step along that path.

[Isaac]

I admire your perseverance with this kit. You have invested allot of time making this kit go together kicking and screaming.

It is good experience.

In the future, you will want to build a quality P-40 kit.


Isaac

[palindrome]

It is done - yay!

After finishing the landing gear last time, I finished up the underbody ducting. This took a couple of tries, because there are no formers for the long underbody segment, and the fuselage as assembled didn't conform to the intended shape, so I had to remake it without doing the cuts & joins that are supposed to curve the ducting. This step also including finishing the undercowl cooling flaps. That part at least went on OK:



Now flip the plane back over and finish things.

The kit also includes surrounds for the rear windows that cover up the fuselage section joint (and actually do make the finished model look better). But again, poorly designed. The camouflage on the left side piece is way off. I've started to play around with Inkscape a little bit and I was able to fix this one fairly easily. The second picture shows the original on top, and the corrected piece below. The right side overlay was OK:



I added the carburetor inlet and the cowl gun covers. The carburetor inlet is designed wrong. It's supposed to be circular in front, not oval, but if the piece is lifted up enough to remain circular, there's not enough duct body to connect to the fuselage. This is beyond my current Inkscape abilities, so I just installed it with the front squashed:



Now the canopies. I installed the canopy top in the open position, so the cockpit interior is more visible. The early P-40s had a curved single-segment front windscreen, with an armored-glass insert (later P-40s had a multipiece windscreen with a flat armored glass front segment). This and the reflector gunsight are modeled OK. In unfortunately got a bit too much glue on the windscreen while installing the armored glass insert. Oh well:



The propeller was fairly straightforward. The blades are 3 layers with a wrapped base. The pieces were poorly shaped, but using a French curve to cut them out made the pieces match up properly:



Finally, the machine gun barrels, pitot tubes, and antenna wires:



Gallery of the completed model in the next post. I must say, this has been a much longer and more painful build than I expected when I started. It did, however, demonstrate the upside of digital download models. I was able to reprint and even fix pieces as I needed. If I had made some of these mistakes with a pre-printed model, ugh. Yes, I scan them before I start. But unless you're working only from a self-printed version, matching color and paper is problematic.

I'm also going to experiment with other spray coatings before I build my next model. I did this one with 2 coats of Krylon matte fixative, but glue marks in particular are highly visible. I bought a can of Krylon Crystal Clear Acrylic Coating, which is a glossy finish. But if it does better with glue marks, I can always spray the finished model with a clear matte finish.

I'm pretty sure I know what I'm building next, but I'm gonna take a few days away and I need to do my surface-finish experiments before start it.

Thanks for listening to me vent about this model

[palindrome]

Finished model:

[MacSongLi]

Given all of the issues. You did a great job with work arounds, and kitbashing. Your completed kit looks great.

Hopefully the kit designer will see this thread and make the much needed improvements.

Gary

[YankeeBoy]

I doubt there will be any corrections by the designer, George Chen, who has been inactive in model design for several years. What puzzles me is why there were so many problems with the build. I built Mr. Chen's Beaufighters, P-40s and Meteor with no problems at all. I also repainted a few of his designs for my own pleasure. Some of his work was repainted and rescaled to 1:33 a while back but your build is the original design by Mr. Chen. I'm happy to see you finished it and it looks good but I'm mystified at the inaccuracies and omissions that you encountered.

[Don Boose]

Congratulations on completing the build in spite of the difficulties.

I look forward to your next project.

Don