Long time, no see!
Well my wife was on my butt to get the basement finished and boy was that a long drawn out process.
I will say it's nice to have a better basement and a nicer area to work. Someday I will sheetrock the hobby room but the rest of the basement is done!
P-40N:
This kit was supposed to help restore my mojo and by that I mean to just relax and no more AMS to bog me down.
Well...the Mauve kit is really beautiful. It has nice panel lines and good accurate shapes, but...
They compromised in a few key areas that I cannot ignore. So, I think from now on it will be exclusively Hasegawa for P-40s.
One area to address is the intake grill which is pretty frickin' prominent on a P-40. It HAS to look right.
The pieces in the kit are awful and have almost no alignment capability. It can drive you crazy just dry fitting.
So I had to come up with my own way to achieve solid, repeatable alignment:
The leading edge shape needed good ol' styrene, files, and patience to reshape:
Here it is completed and with a coat of Mr. Surfacer White out of the spray can. Wonderful stuff!
I also worked on the instrument panel which is from the Eduard photoetch set made for the "Eduard" kit (they did a Profipack version of the Mauve kit).
Here you see it with a piece of clear acetate epoxied onto the instrument faces.
And here assembled with a little Micro Crystal Clear around the edge of the "sandwich" of parts:
One more photo.
This is a resin part from the True Details cockpit set. It is a marvelous fit and worth every penny.
Not much going on here but I experimented with cheap craft store acrylic satin black paint, as a primer.
I wanted to see if I could airbrush it and it did fine (although it didn't cover well in one coat).
I must say it snuggled down and did not hide even one bit of surface detail!
