quang

Excellent in every respect. The plane, the car, the figures. Even the collie And I won't mention the square pattern on the skirt !

Welcome Marco! That must be the Revell kit. Man, that was a long, time ago….

Haha I'm trying to catch up with you myself. Now turning my attention to that damn air intake!

Correcting the tail. A sheet of celluloid is placed on the reference photo and the correct contour cut out. The resulting shape is transferred to a sheet of 0.10" plasticard. Plastic card with the correct profile The correct profile is glued on the right fuselage half. Milliput is applied and sanded. It may be just a matter of half a millimeter but the result is noticeable and well worth it. [/u

Hi David, The gun panel joint is perfectible. I admit I was a little heavy-handed. In fact all the removable panels fit admirably but they need a very light touch and a thin plastic cement like MEK applied with a fine brush.

Thank you Martin. It's your build that convinced me to jump into the fray. Up to now, my main worries were the fuselage length and the wheels. But no doubt there's more Your insight is very welcome of course.

Hi Steve, That would mean I'll have to move the radio hatch somewhat. I have the rudder and the supercharger intake to deal with first.

Hi Madcop, thank you for your suggestion but according to my 'reference' photo, the extension must be located just behind the spinner. Furthermore, putting the plug in front of the windscreen would only move the nose gear forward .

The sanded area is kept small to preserve a maximum of detail. Behind the scene. Apart from some epoxy putty used to reinforce the plug, the original plastic is left untouched.

There's a small step indeed to be dealt with, but nothing horrific as you can see; Before sanding A thin coat of acrylic paint is applied to the plug area. First rough sanding with half-round files. Thin layer of Milliput added; Fine sanding with Micromesh followed with thin coat of acrylic primer.

Aah! Don't tell me, old school modelling!

With the clear parts on. Again, a very good fit.

Thank you all for your comments. I always thought of the P-39 as a pudgy little fellow, well it's NOT. Other than extending the fuselage, my biggest concern is to restore the compound curves with a minimum of puttying and sanding. I think that the staggered cut method is one way to do it. I dry-fit the the fuselage halves together with the internal chassis. Everything fits perfectly as per the book. And most important, the fuselage is not distorted, the vertical tail is straight and true. So far so good.

Repeat with the other fuselage half.

Fuselage is extended to the right length using styrene strips. Photos are self-explanatory.

The result

Thank you guys for your warm welcome and your support in this project. Now read on. My method for lengthening the fuselage is unorthodox but it will hopefully save me the pitfalls of the conventional ones. Needless to say I learned a lot from the other members' builds, notably Martin. I started to work on the right-hand half-fuselage checking constantly with the print-out for alignment etc… It's very important to keep the mating surface of the half-fuselage perfectly flat to avoid distortion when mating the two fuselage halves together. Instead of making a straight vertical cut, I opted for a staggered cut. It will hopefully save me from cutting through the wing root and having to reshape it afterwards. The cut is made in 3 steps. The 2 vertical steps using a rasor saw and the final horizontal step by scoring with a X-Acto blade.

And now the GOOD news: The front and aft parts of the fuselage line up 'perfectly' with the photo. The shape of the rudder is off and the nose is 2 mm short but these are small meat compared with the overall length issue.

I'm well aware of the heated debate concerning the fuselage length as well as the outright debunking of the kit. The built-up model on the KH site looks pretty good if a little pudgy to my eye. And since there's no definite pictural proof on the forums, I had to look by myself. So here's my reference pic: Now with the completed right fuselage half: Gentlemen, that's what I call a no-brainer.

Hello everyone, This is my first posting so let me introduce myself. My name is Quang. I've been modelling aircraft since the early sixties. Then came a 20-year hiatus when I took up sculpting and painting figures. Now I'm getting back to my first love: things that fly. I love doing cockpits and interiors. I like subjects with an interesting history. Uneventful builds annoy me. I like kits that fight back. So I guess the Kitty Hawk P-39 is a natural choice. The kit itself comes as a pleasant surprise. Delicate surface detail, well moulded, no distorted part,…. So let's waste no time and tackle the main controversy about this kit: the fuselage length. As the nose is in several parts, we need to assemble at least one half of the entire fuselage in order to check out its length. The operation went on smoothly even if several parts were simply butt-joined. A testimony to KH precise engineering. My main reference is a near-perfect, distorsion-free profile picture of a 'modern' Airacobra blown up to 1/32 scale (distance from the front end –sans spinner– to the tail post on the print-out is 255 mm as opposed to the publicised Bell data of 254,35 mm. Not bad in my book).