docdodj01

Finished rigging the wings

More rigging work

Now comes the hard part: rigging. I know turnbuckles and round monofilament isn't accurate, but I found a monofilament called 'tournament silver". The control wires I plan to use EZ line elastic rigging, So here we go:

Wash and some mild weathering done. Currently assembled the landing gear struts, with wheels just dry fitted.

Hello Kai, Actually, these are model lacquer colors produced here in the Philippines. The Brand is Armored Komodo Paints. The closest equivalent would be those from AK real colors, The PC color is British Dark Olive Green, and the Dope is Cream White.

Wing roundels are on

Some more decal work on the landing struts, wing struts wheel

Ouch! Thanks for the warning man! :-)

Built up the landing strut subassembly, dry fitting it to keep the alignment of the struts

decals are started on the fuselage and stabilizer

The 3 subassemblies dry fitted. To be fair, you can fit all the rest of the parts, if you're confident enough, with PVA glue, and use the rigging to hold em all together.

On with the build. Since based on dry fitting, the cockpit, fuselage and lower wing should align itself without any effort, so I glued the fuselage and cockpit subassembly Also, if you plan to build the trainer or the RNAS carrier trial pup with lewis guns, obviously you won't install the vickers gun. But they don't clearly indicate in the images of the build to leave out the ammo container for the vickers. They mention it in passing, but can be easily missed since we usually follow the pictures to check our progress.

Before the build, I of course researched on how the kit goes, and the report was the cockpit parts, when mated to the fuselage then mated to the wings, will cause alignment issues, in which the fuselage won't fit flush with the wing bottom, and that you have to shave of or and the cockpit floor. After doing some dry fitting, I found a solution: The cockpit floor, has circular notches at the bottom: That fits on the lower wings, which has the circular pegs: If you actually fit the cockpit parts, WITHOUT trapping it in the fuselage first, the cockpit floor sits flush over the wing bottom. It seems that the trouble stems partly when you glue in the curved spars on the cockpit sides that causes the problem, since mounting the part misaligned even by a few millimeters, will cause fit issues. There are 2 solutions: either mount the cockpit subassembly to the wing, then build the fuselage around it (which may add to effort in painting the kit later, OR Glue the cockpit subassembly to the fuselage half at the rear locating part CAREFULLY. Then dry fit this fuselage/cockpit subassembly on the lower wings. Once the fuselage half and the cockpit has been solidly mated, you can remove this subassembly from the lower wing, and then glue the other half of the fuselage to close everything up Note at this point, I haven't glued the fuse together, and only held in place with tape But you can already see that the fit is flush and exact. One way to check it is look inside the cockpit. From the front of the lower wing, there is the lowered area where the cockpit floor should sit flush.

Some detail painting on the pulley on the wings

Cockpit built up Dry fitted the detailed Instrument panel onto the cockpit And decal instrument faces placed on after

Seat and belts built and painted

Painted the parts, and started to divide into different subassemblies Engine built and painted

Painted the cockpit floor using cream white lacquer paint. I also detailed painted the other wooden rudder pedals, and wooden foot plank. The stick was painted with silver metallics.

Started a build of my second WNW kit. This will be finished in the markings of Lt Dunning's Pup used in experiments of flying aircraft on ships, basically the birth of the carrier and naval aircraft. Started on the cockpit sides and turtle deck. Painted a cream white, wood grain done with oils, and sealed with mix of clear yellow and orange from tamiya.

These display replicas are completely scratch built by our members and will be displayed in a museum in time for the 80th celebration:

Maybe they may release it in some manner in the future, similar to the 1/48 p-51 kits. But I think they focused on these three since it would be popular both in japan and abroad. As an example, I live in the Philippines, and all 3 planes markings were here back in ww2

Wow. At least they chose the top 3 P-38 aces of the USAAF in the pacific. Nice

Thank you for the response! 20mm it is!

A question to the experts: how can you identify the P-39 center cannon? How to see if it’s a 37mm or 20mm? I tried using the decals as a source, but it seems P-400 and P-39s had a mix of a short and long cannons. I’m specifically building lt Erickson’s P-39D. According to the instructions it uses the long 20mmcannons, BUT according to my research P-39Ds used the 37mm ones

Nice work! I'm up to buy a conversion too! Also, you may want to check the 1/32 B-17 by HK. Maybe the cowlings would be easier and more properly shaped than the 1/32 SBD. :-)