KUROK

Great review! Thanks! Note: I did see a small nick or flaw in the photo of the clear sliding canopy.

Ah just grab a P-51D. It's a better looking plane than the "H" anyway.

Great job! I have a ZM and wish to seal up all the fuselage skin like you did. Can I just do all of it at once so I can get tight fit? Or will that mess up the build sequence?

True. It took a while for them to "bleed" down as they are held up by hydraulic pressure.

I have built the AMT kit as well and it is not bad at all. It builds nicely but I did not like the engine panels that have to be carefully glued on. I would say the Mauve kit has more refined surface (panel lines) and the shapes are bit more correct. Drawback of Mauve is the open holes at the intakes and wheel well detail sucks. Cockpit is no good but the inexpensive True Details resin cockpit fits like a glove and is a no-brainer for Mauve. Although I have never actually built the hasegawa version, I see that there are just fewer things to fix.

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 toaddress 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 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!

Fantastic!

WOW!!!! That looks really great!

Hey Peter, Looks like you are doing the Oxford blue Sea Fury from RAAF? I'm doing that one too, someday. One thing I cannot find is the color of the wheel bay interiors although I know the restored version flying today is light gray. Also, I'm paying attention to the colors you use in the cockpit too because my sources are scant in that area too.... Vince

Oh I see it now. It's that darker metal the used for the exhausts area. So the "Lou IV" has a pale blue background then?

I'll put in my $0.02 cents... If you look at the "Lou IV" on the cowling there is a little triangle of blue to the upper right of the letters. It looks to be same hue as gun ports so my vote is blue for gun ports.

You could take a picture of your model out in the sun and convert it to black and white photo. Then you could see if the contrast is same as orginal.

This may inspire me to get started on mine. I have an older one without the solid wing.

Wow! That is fantastic! Be proud, you did a great job on it!

I think those aluminum sheet rolls from Home Depot are too "springy" and stiff for what he is doing (unless you can anneal it).