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This is the bird I'm aiming for, but that white-wash job looks tough to replicate. Lots of experimentation ahead.

Well all good things must come to an end. This is the finished Hasegawa 1/32 P-40E. Let me recap. -Scratchbuilt interior minus seven kit parts, one resin engine, and one resin seat. -Scratchbuilt tail wheel assembly. -Scratchbuilt wing framing. -Scratchbuilt .50 cals. -After market decals. All told way to long to finish. But I will take it. Again the pictures are much too faded but this time I know why. There are some issues/omissions, glaring to me. The ones I did not fix are the ones that would require me to tear the build apart and start over. Thank you for looking in. All comments, critiques, and criticism are encouraged. Joe

tailwheel with the white sidewalls indicates the grounding point

never clean, busting Russian tanks is a dirty business . Looking great Tim !

Got the wings glued together, and per the A-2 Trop designation it used new weapon aiming systems, enlarged DB603M engines, and longer/ reinforced wings, I used the extented longer wingtips. I slipped the wings on to see where I was, and then busted out the G-Factor gear. I initially though I wasn't going to use them, as I thought I could just use the OOB fork and gear with my own oleo strut, but I definitely did NOT like the look of the smaller A-0 wheel and fork, and wanted to use the larger front tire of the B series Do-335. I really wanted to turn the front nose wheel to add some interest, but I quickly discovered that trying to bend or otherwise turn the G-Factor gear was not worth the risk. It was then, that I figured out that the G-Factor gear was for the B-2/6 and had the larger single sided fork for the larger front tire, so I decided to go with that. The stance looks pretty good here right out of the package, and in my eye will only get better once the larger MLG wheels are put on with the slightly smaller nose wheel. Fit of the wings is pretty good. The fit of the G-Factor gear is quite loose and the angles of all the gear here is really off as all 3 gear are just loosely setting in position: Next up, I took the wings back off, so I could get the landing light straightened out. It was not much of anything OOB, so I boxed in all three sides with plastic card, so all seems were hidden, then added a PE sheet for the back for two rounded lights (I didnt like the look of the normal square ones) and added two thing-a-ma-bobs from the watch bits I got off E-bay. The light fixture is canted a bit, so as to stay level with the ground, as apposed to level with the dihedral of the wings. Later I will add a center post and some glass for the lights using my UV gel "Bondic" pen: The beginnings of a first a spritz of MRP chrome: Again, seemingly MUCH better looking IRL than I can get in pics. More tonight, as Im working toward getting the MLG wheel wells buttoned up and decent without spending TOO much time on them, or going TOO crazy with them.

Some update.. I have used Master Details Horizontal tail surfaces as usual on my Hasegawa s early Spitfires.

Hawkwrench, the engineering is incredible, really well though out. Plus the instruction manual is accurate and easy to follow. This is my progress to date: An utter joy to assemble and paint, the tiny decals from barracuda were quite fiddly, but well worth the trouble. They really bring the cockpit to life! I really like the seatbelts as well, however I found it incredibly difficult to bend them convincingly. Any comments, criticism good or bed are welcomed thanks.

Some photos with where I'm at... Roundels are now sitting nicely - albeit with a few cracks that will need touching in on the fuselage roundels. Model loosely put together - with dry fitted undercarriage - and, for the first time - test piece canopies in place to test fit (these are not the final quality ones!). Excuse the dust on the model - will just wipe off! Have fun! Iain

Well all good things must come to an end. This is the finished Hasegawa 1/32 P-40E. Let me recap. -Scratchbuilt interior minus seven kit parts, one resin engine, and one resin seat. -Scratchbuilt tail wheel assembly. -Scratchbuilt wing framing. -Scratchbuilt .50 cals. -After market decals. All told way to long to finish. But I will take it. Again the pictures are much too faded but this time I know why. There are some issues/omissions, glaring to me. The ones I did not fix are the ones that would require me to tear the build apart and start over. Thank you for looking in. All comments, critiques, and criticism are encouraged. Joe

I weathered one pod this weekend, and started on the second. Since I'm doing winter bird, after it was fully weathered and a lacquer matte clear sprayed over it, I used white acrylic thinned down to white wash the front portion that was painted RLM 70, and then wear some of that off with a moist brush, and then some additional weathering. Not sure I'm totally happy with the result of the white part, but as I intend the bird to be very heavily worn, I think it will work. Hard to tell until I get it on a bigger surface. Also started on the main wing, which required a lot more sanding than I expected to feather in the long wingtips of the G-2. The parts fit was not as tight as I had hoped. Tim

Спасибо! I painted the inside frame of the windscreen and glued it into the fuselage. I am very happy with how this has turned out. Now it was onto the small details. Some of this stuff probably isn't needed, but all of them combined will make the model a little bit more realistic. There is a small panel line on the kit that represents the belly tank lift point. I hollowed it out with micro chisels and added a small piece of plastic card to represent the attachment point. The rudder trim tab has a small actuator fairing just forward of its leading edge, but no actuator. I slightly reshaped the tab and added the actuator rod, and brackets. The kit has a rectangular hole for a vent and its door is represented with a resin part. (notice in this pic I have drilled out the small formation light, ready to accept a clear blue part) I felt that the door was going to be a little slim, so I carved a rebate on the top and bottom edge that a larger door would fit into, according to my references. A new door was made from plastic card, with the actuator rod from brass. Lots of period photos show this door opened quite a way. I drilled out the small panel that represents the fuselage refueling point cover. My references show that this cover was left off in most photos of the aircraft serving in the combat zone and I wanted to represent it that way. I made up a fuel tank cap from plastic rod. Notice that I have also scribed a new panel line from the corner of the rear canopy to just in front of the horizontal stabilizer. Something visible in all of my pics of the aircraft but was missed in the kit. From a different angle. Could possibly go in a bit further, but at least that detail is now there. I made the cap removable at this stage so that I could paint it and install it after I have done the major painting stage. You can also notice in this pic that I have scribed a panel line behind the rear window and also above it, as this area was openable to gain access to the radio compartment on the real thing. As the vac formed clear part is very thin, I scribed the line into the the resin, just behind the join to prevent any #%^ ups.

I never knew Darth Vader made models, but hey it is kind of cool I suppose

Made s bit of progress on this, decided to start with the hard bits. And boy, were they hard!! I am using the brass gun barrels and sights from Master, and I have never seen anything so tiny in my life! Not only am I befuddled at how anything that small can be machined, but assembly is right bear for this big hamfisted bear whose eyesight has taken a nose dive these last couple of years. The little posts with the beads on them are literally the size of a needle point, as you can see one of them inside a PE seatbelt buckle for scale!! I combined the brass Master parts with the resin gun and shroud from the Aries cockpit set, but I used copper wire and some plastic to scratch the sight arms, as the PE sights from Aries don't look good (because they are flat PE), and the kit part is ridiculously out of scale. End result isn't bad, but is mighty dainty, so I packed it in a small sauce cup with a gob of rubber eraser I keep around for such things. Whew! Now on to the gun pods..... Tim

Hi All - I,m a newbie on LSP and thought I would post up my restoration of an old Hasegawa 1/32 Skyhawk kit that was gradually losing bits and succumbing to damage sitting on a shelf. I actually have a current post for the WIP on Britmodeller and have only recently discovered some Skyhawk models on LSP by GDW and Anthony in NZ that got my admiration - as it is a 1/32 model I thought I would post the WIP here as well. The link to the Britmodeller WIP is here - https://www.britmodeller.com/forums/index.php?/topic/235027738-ran-a4g-skyhawk/ The photos below show where the restoration is up to as of this morning. This is a shot of where she will sit in the display case next to my Fisher Sea Fury - might even be able to squeeze a 1/32 Sea Venom with folded wings in there too one day & maybe the Fisher Firefly! regards CJP

Hi all, The cross bracing for the outer wing struts, cabane struts and forward fuselage are done. The line tags will be cut away and any slackness in the lines sorted, once the remaining wing landing and flying wires are rigged. Mike

Excellent work so far! Håkan

dirty underside and odd position of the national insignia

I'm slowly plugging along. I've been working on the wing fold which has been a bit more work than I thought it would. I've got everything else fixed so this is one of the last few things I have to complete before I head to the paint barn. I've got one wing done and not being a big scratch builder, it took some time to get it looking half way decent. I can already tell the wing join is going to be a bit fragile. I made a wing fold brace based on some photos I've seen which will have the added advantage of strengthening it a bit...hopefully. All this turned out to be more work than just redoing the extended wings. Broken wing parts: Hopefully this will look better under a coat of paint! Working on the locking mechanism: I'm going to wait until the end of the build before I attach these, it will be easier to paint not to mention I will surely break them off if I don't Here is the exhaust joint I had to fix. It looks terrible but it should only need a few touch ups after I hit it with primer I've been adding a few more small details like the framing on the inside of the flap areas. Most of this won't be very visible but I like the way it brings out the details. I probably won't have too many more to add until I primer everything and make the inevitable touch ups. Thanks for looking in! Bryan

Thx Anthony, very much appreciate the encouraging words! Here's a better pic of the ACMI pods, since there was some discussion about it: Also, I did finish the Sniper pod. This is the Eduard version, which is nicely detailed and very tightly produced such that the gaps around the windows are kept to a minimum. However, the window and leds section seems very undersized. I initially tried using the front section of the Academy pod but the fit of the lens to the body isn't the best and I ended up making a hash of gluing that together. As you can see from those pics I am about finished with the model, next update will be the done deal! Cheers, Marcel

HI Everyone, Today was Sturm und Drang with my Silhouette Protrait machine. This was the first marking I did. The rare IV Gruppe cross symbol. Unfortunately a little aft, I, I suffered some paint lifting. Otherwise it came out perfectly! On the starboard side, all of my efforts resulted in bad lifting! You can imagine the expletives. I repaired the stbd side three times before I realized the reason for the lifting. I didn't do any sanding here. One of the masks is beginning to migrate a little bit. I always make a few spares of each marking. I did finish the spinner, happily. The yellow twelve has black outlines, complicating the masking. The upper wing crosses are masked. too. I'm gonna use decals for the tail markings and stencils borrowed from a Trumpy kit. Ugh! More paint damage! Thanks for looking! Gaz

You're gonna love this kit! I'll be following your work closely. I know you said you are building it stock but if you have any interest in some really nice aftermarket decals, head over to Fundekals and check out their offerings. Great work so far on the cockpit!

Just a dirty cotton bud Mark - sorry to disappoint. Well we are never happy are we! I convinced myself that the only RLM 83 (old name) out of the bottle I had was too light - indeed the Polyscale bottle said 82 'Dark Green' and their 83 was the lighter green instead of the other way around - anyway I had no other 'Old name 83' dark green and there was a big difference between the 83 chip in the Ullmann book and that on the card provided with the Merrick volumes and so believing that what I could see in most photos was darker than what I had done and seeing that the 83 chip in the Ullmann book was darker than the Merrick cards I opted to mix Xtracolour 73 with 10% Xtracolour 71. The photos came out terrible as I was losing the light at the time but most of the model is now more a 'bronze Green' than an Olive Green and fits the Ullman chip and I think the photos better than what I had.......I think haha? O what have I done??????? Please do not think that I am going for a two-tone green machine - it is just the way the light is hitting the middle of the right wing but that being said I have not put too much paint on

First up, I finished the elbow rest for the Ruhrstahl X-4 control stick. Since no pics of the actual elbow rest exist (that I know of) and the fact that this is a later iteration of the X-4 this is what mine looks like. Its not perfect but looks the part IMHO. It actually swivels and locks out of the way, swinging back toward the console, but I have it locked in the extended position so people can see what its actually for: Next up it was time to make sure the fuselage was closed up. I got the fuselage closed up, and the spine graphed on. The fit on both was actually pretty good: Next up, I got the QB exhausts painted and installed. These were not rusted out, nor super weathered ,but I used Alclad jet exhaust, followed by some Alclad pale burnt metal, and then some flat clear with soot on the tips. All sounds complex, but the colors sort of blended more than I expected They actually look much better IRL than in pics: Then I took some time and got the engine covers installed. This took some doing, as the rear engine covers were a tight fit, and getting the trailing edge around the exhausts was a bit of a task. For this, I was in a quandary about how to mask all those exhausts stacks off. What I ended up doing, was some fancy dancy masking, by actually making a pocket of tape for the exhausts and attaching them to the panels before gluing in the engine cover panels, both front and rear. This seems a bit odd, but it resulted in a very tight mask around each exhaust set on each side. So far this has worked out better than I hoped, but the litmus test will be once the model is painted, as I will see if the tape comes off as easy as I hope it will. I made sure to attach the inner portion of the tape with minimal attachments to the inside surface of the engine covers, so when it does come time to remove the tape, there wont be a lot of tape holding things in place from the inside. I also could not resist putting the cowl, cowl flaps, rad front and both props on as a mock-up to see what things are going to look like: As you can see, I also cut down the port side exhaust intake shield, as I thought it looked odd extending so far beyond the rear of the exhausts: Both rear engine panels did fit, but they were tight, and will need a bit of finish sanding/tidying up: All in all, Im very please at how fast this one is going together, and how well its turning out: Tomorrow today (starting right now actually!) we are supposed to get 6 - 10" of the white stuff, and hit a low of -5F, so the boss just said to work from home. That means its Friday and Ill be working on work model stuff here. I think tomorrow I will be hitting the spares drawer to see what I can find in the way of louvers or scoops for some extra rear engine cooling for the A-2 Trop. I also got the Eduard exterior in, so am also going to try to get the rad screen painted and installed as well. As always cheers and thanks for dropping in on me!

Hi, Started to paint and weather the rim covers. Basecoat is RAL 7003 from ZERO PAINTS. Added Tamiya XF-71 and XF-57 for a thin top coat. Added a first wash and some streaking. Added a wet coat of hair spray for some 30 secs. This will weather the paintjob chemically! Then rinsed the parts with warm water. Let dry. Use wooden sticks, pins etc. to partially remove the now bleached top coat. Add washes and streaking. Dirt and dust will follow once the rubber tires has been painted. Bye for now :-)

Thanks guys! That actually isnt bad news, as I changed my story to reflect Marseilles scheme change as a general tribute to JG-27s first days on the African continent. In other news on the Do-335 front, thanks to our very own Mikkel (AKA Mebo here on LSP) I now have coming to me some absolutely gorgeous 1/32nd X-4 Ruhrstahl wire guided missles to hang under the Do-335 along with the small mods (joystick and elbow rest mainly) that go with the XRuhrstahls: And the small dash mounted joystick to control them: Thanks again Mikkel!