mrintense

Wow Dave, Great Work. My P-38 has languished all year because of the work needed to restore the surface detail after eliminating the rivets. I finally got back to it a week ago and hope to start painting soon. But you'rs looks magnificent and really inspires me to get mine done. Superb job with the Rub N Buff. I am really looking forward to seeing this one completed. Carl

Might I add a suggestion for your hose. I've used the technique you mentioned also but added a coating of liquid mask agent afterwards. This helps to hold the wire together and gives the hose a rubber look Carl Smoot

I'm building mine in flight just after take off so the weight will be on the support stand rather than the struts. Putting a model this big in an inflight dio presents challenges and it's probably the only one I'll ever do this way. I enjoy seeing models in flight so I had to try it out on this aircraft (one of my favorites). The only thing I'm not doing is simulating the spinning props because I just think the P-38 props look so cool and I wanted them to be seen. Carl

Hey Dave, It's amazing looking at your photos. It's like looking at my own model. I have similar pictures. It's rather hard to fit it all in the picture frame isn't it? I see the same white styrene filling the same gaps I had on my kit. Like you, I have a real desire to build this aircraft. Many many, manny years ago I helped a friend build the Revell kit while I was building the Revell P-47. We both entered in a local model contest and his won first place. I wanted to build one for myself and tried back in the 80's but life got in the way. So this has been a labor of love, and I'm determined to finish it. I've started the rescribing and polishing now and maybe by the end of the next month I'll be ready to start painting. Good luck with your project as well. Looking forward to seeing more in progress shots. I'll try to get some of my own as soon as I can get a chance. Cheers Carl

Holy Cow Brian, This is the first time I've seen this thread. This work is fantastic. Really great work. It's late in the morning and I need to get going with getting ready for work, but I am going to come back to this thread and examine it more closely. Again, really really beautiful work. Thanks for sharing . Carl

Hi Brian, thanks for the kind words. Coming from a master such as yourself, I really appreciate it. I've watched in awe as some of your work has unfolded in the past. I especially like the P-40 and the Corsair. You might have missed in one of my postings, that I'm building this aircraft in an inflight setting with the struts in partial retraction. This was my solution to the excessive nose weight required to keep this from being a tail setter. I had doubts about the kit's struts to take the weight over the long hall. I knew about the aftermarket metal struts available and I've seen the metal struts that Dave made for his P-38, but I prefer to build my kits in flight generally. The wheel wells were detailed before I made the decision to build in flight. So for that reason, the pilot has to stay in. I do have to get better at painting figures, however. This pilot is particularly ugly. He probaly enjoys going out on missions because he certainly isn't having any after hours fun with a face like that! Cheers Carl

Thought I would provide an update since it's been about six months since the last one. It's been a period of ups and downs. It started of quite well when I finished the filling and sanding in March of this year. I was finially completed with all the surface restoration after all the filling and sanding which seemed to take forever. The first coat of primer went on in early April. Oh glorious days I'm finally getting to the point where I can paint! But it seems the modeling gods had other ideas, as I quickly realized that my rivet restoration efforts looked like crap and even the original rivetwork by Trumpeter look way too pronounced to me. After hemming and hawing for a week I took the plunge and strted filling in all those dang rivets. Now two months later, I'm 99% finished with filling and sanding the aircraft. But now I facing a long period of panel rescribing. Thankfully, much of it will entail simply removing putty that has filled in the original seams. But it will still be a tedious process. Some of the other ups: well the best was the completion of the decal artwork and the subsequent printing of said decals. Here's a sample of the artwork. I bought some decal paper from Bare Metal Foil for laser printing and printed them on a Dell color laser. The printing was absolutely outstanding, looking every bit as good as the pyn up decals that used to be available from Meteor Productions. The 8th Airforce logo looks ragged at this size but it's actual size is 3/8ths of an inch in diameter and at that size it looks great. I had a bit of trouble with the nose art when it was reduced to it's final size. The fine yellow lines disappeared!. But a little fattening up of the lines in the artwork caused them to look right when the artwork was subsequently reduced to correct size again. I recently tried one of them out on a test model and it worked like a champion. So I have five good sets of these decals waiting whenver I finally get past the assembly stage. The other up point, I successfully drilled the mounting hole for the stand and fashioned the stand from acrylic rod. That is ready as well. Still have to make the base, I'll do that when the kit gets a bit further on. I'll try to get some more pictures posted soon, but frankly there hasn't been anything interesting to show for quite some time. Carl Smoot

Okay here is the second picture. This was actually taken about a month ago and I've since finished sanding the aircraft in it's entirety. Now for all the surface detail restoration work, minus the rivets. I won't hijack your thread anymore. Any future postings will be in my thread, where ever it might be. Dave. once, again. Nice work so far on you P-38 and I cannot wait to see you'r done. Carl Smoot

Hello Dave, Nice to see some more work on the P-38. Not to be mean spirited or anything, but I got a bit of a chcuckle from your pictures of the underside gaps. I went through this same process late last year and it was tedious. Sorry I don't have anything better to offer. I will say that perseverance will utlimately pay off but it will take time. I am curious however in how you are or have dealt with the riveting that is destroyed in the inevitable fill and sand process. I attempted to re-drill mine using a #80 drill bit (a quite tedious process that took months of work - all for naught - more in a moment). Here is a picture of my kit after the first coat of primer: As you can see the rivets look quite prominent. Well eventually they got the best of me and I decided I couldn't live with them. So, for the last two months I've been filling and sanding them. I just completed the first filling and sanding session of the entire aircraft and now have to do a bit of minor filling and sanding to hit some areas that didn't take the first round. Then it's going to be another long session of rescribing all the panel lines . But no rivets!!! Look at the next post for a picture of the plane in it's current status. By hook or by crook, I'm going to finish this beastie. Carl Smoot Pursuing a new career as a P-38 assembler - Two and half years running

OD Painted US Army Bird

Here's a good shot of the underside. Sorry about the smaller pics but the 100K upload size is forcing this. I have bigger versions available via email if you need them Carl This will have to be it for now. More later. Again, feel free to email me at mrintense56@austin.rr.com for additional material too big to post here.

Here's another of the crashed Lancer A-56-5 Carl

Here's a nice clear shot of the Aussie Lancer Carl

Okay, here's the first of some of the stuff I have to offer. More will come later as I have to get back to work in a few minutes. I have a slighly larger version available via email if you want. Carl Smoot

If you wouldn't mind contacting me at mrintense56@austin.rr.com, I sure would like to get a full size copy of that drawing. And I'm sorry about not posting anything last night. We had a tornado producing storm go through our neighborhood last night and I was a bit pre-occupied. Carl

Hi everyone, Saw this thread and couldn't help but to respond. I built a P-43 Lancer several years ago using the Classic Airframes 1/48th scale kit and have amassed quite a bit of useful material on the subject. I am willing to post some of that here and will do so this evening when I get home from work. But I wanted to comment on the consideration of which model to use as the starting point. The P-43 is quite different from both the P-47 and the P-35. It looks more like the P-47, but is smaller. Using either kit will require a considerable amount of rework. My personal feeling is that it would be nearly as easy to build the fuselage from scratch, maybe borrowing pieces from those two kits. It might be possible to use the spine from the razorback P-47 for example. The P-35's wings might work with considerable mods (most noteably, the wheel wells). The Cowling of the P-47 is far closer in shape than the F4F cowling one person mentioned, but the size differntuial might be a problem. As for research material, be really careful of lall drawings out there as they are all wrong in some respects, some very much so. Classic Airframes kit is a good example of what relying on drawings can lead to. I had to insert a 1/4 inch (scale foot) plug aft of the cockpit because the fuselage was too short. I would highly recommend that you pick up a copy of Thunderbolt by Warren Bodie as it has several good photos of the P-43 from the side. Iwill post some here as well. I also have some detailed drawings which I was going to use someday as a starting point for a scratchbuilt P-43 in 1/24th scale. But I have not verified their accuracy and I had intended to re-draw them before starting. I will post these as well. The Australian P-43 profile psoted earlier is new to me, however, from what I've read I think the camera port on the aft fuselage is incorrect. This was an area of considerable discussion when I was researching my Lancer (done in the same markings as the profile). Some research semed to indicate that the cameras in the tail affected the center of gravity too much so they were removed and the hole was covered over with sheetmetal. Other research hinted that this was a canvas cover snapped in placed and removed via a cable while in flight!! I'm pretty sceptical of this second scenario. I do have some other Australian P-43 Lancer photos that are different from those commonly seen on the Internet. Again I will post these as well. Needless to say, I tink this will be an interesting thread to watch if someone goes through with it. Good luck to all who try. Carl mrintense56@austin.rr.com

I am in the final stages of completing this kit. It is indeed the Trump kit with additional decals. It appears to have the TRump decals as well. The kit has been a challenge primarily because of the need to restore the rivet work after filling seams. You might want to consider filling in these rivets with Mr Surfacer. Good Luck Carl

Aren't those landing gear bays a joy!!!. I got a serious case of AMS when I was working on them. It took me nearly a year to get both done, primarily because I kept losing interst. I see you took a stab at replicating the hydraulic lines. I had a particularly difficult time with that and they didn't turn out nearly as nice as I had hoped. The funny part is that most of this will be unviewable once the model is finished(on my model that is) because of the way it will be mounted. Oh well. Nice job Dave and keep up the good work. I hope to have something to post on mine soon. Carl Smoot

Great work Kev, keep up the progress. I see a sow's ear in transition to a silk purse!! Carl

Looking veeeeery good. The small details like the tow ring and the door support bars (correct nomenclature??) really make the gear stand out. This is a build I look forward to seeing progress. Carl Smoot

Well, got the nose cleaned up and the surface detail restored. Next is the canopy windscreen (I decided to do this before doing the booms because it will be easier to do any seam filling, and repair around the windscreen with the booms out of the way. But before I can install the windscreen I need to get some masks so I can paint the interior color of the frames. So it may be awhile before I put up another update. For those interested, the Razor saw I bought from Hawkeye Models worked absolutely great for scribing both through plastic and CA. Nice fine lines and no jumping out of the scribe path as long as a light touch is used. Any comments welcome. Carl Smoot

Hey Kev, This is looking really good. Good luck with this kit and the additions. I've always enjoyed taking an older kit and trying to improve on it. However, I know that it can be frustrating as well because of the types or problems you've already encountered. Keep up the good work and looking forward to more pics. Carl Smoot

Right you are. I too build for enjoyment, but at the same time I strive to get better. This is probably my primary hobby and I want to get as good at it as I can. On another note, how's the weather up in Amarillo? From what I can see on the news, you guys are getting hammered while it's just rainy down here in Austin. Carl

Thanks for the kind comments. I look at other's work on figures including sculpting details and just react with awe. The same goes for the amount of detail being created. It's very inspiring to see this work and frustrating at the same time because I would like to be able to produce kits with that level of detail. I'm not there yet but I will keep trying. One thing I have found is that the right tools make a huge difference. Case in point, on my P-38, I've been using a straight pin mounted in a pin vise for my scribing. I've been using this for some years because it worked better than the store bought scriber I had before. And because of inertia, I have never tried any other techniques for scribing, until last night. I recently recived a new razor saw from Hawkeye Models and I had heard that it was very good at scribing straight lines. So I gave it a try on the armament access doors on the nose of my P-38 (they fit so bad I had to superglue fill all the seams and rescribe). The saw cut very fine lines and even better, cut nice lines in the superglue, which has been a problem for me for quite some time. So now, I have a new technique I can use and I've resolved to trying to not get stuck in a technique rut in the future. Carl Smoot

Well it's been a bit since my last update. So you all don't think I'm sluffing off, I have been working on the P-38. I've attached the nose panels and replaced the gun barrels. No pictures for now primarily because for the last week all I've been doing is filling in seams, smoothing them out and restoring surface detail. Extremely tedious and boring, but I make myself do some every day so that I can continue moving forward. Once the nose is complete, it's time to attach the booms and then another round of seam filling. I'll post some picts of the model once the booms are attached so please bear with me for now. IN the meantime, there are plenty of excellent models on this forum to follow along. \ Cheers Carl Smoot