Alex

Love it that 5 of the first 6 entries are WWII warbirds...

Going to dig out my Tamiya Mustang kit for this one. I'm not going to use any of Tamiya's schemes, I don't think. I'll build a 21st FG plane based on this book I've already ordered the HGW wet transfers set for stencils and national insignia. Before starting I need to finish painting my P-36A FIRST though...

Yes. Turns out that the black is rough on the fuselage sides above the wings. Seems like I’ve learned and forgotten that lesson about spray direction before... Sigh. I think I can solve it through fine sanding and polishing, but I will need to give the paint a little bit more time to cure first. Maybe I do need to kick off some interim project. I certainly have enough kits laying around.

Been a while since I updated this thread. A combination of a quick (local) getaway with my wife preventing me from being at the bench and a lack of desire to closely photo-journalize the slog through dealing with aligning wing to fuselage and closing the plethora of resulting gaps. That said, the airframe is assembled and ready, finally, for some paint. Somewhere along the way I lost one of my home-made machine gun barrels and so will need to remake that. I've also made new exhaust stubs from brass tubing and will probably scratch a replacement for the poor kit pitot

That’s top drawer work on those airbrakes, for sure.

Those are beautiful

The paint erosion on the invasion stripes is particularly nice. Restrained and realistic looking. Congrats on wrapping up a great build!

Landing gear look nice!

Very nice pre-shading. Excited to see how that works out under the decals...

Nice job! The combination of the better 3-D shape of the kit molding and your careful work with the decals beats the Eduard part hands-down. Are you going to use some Future or similar to make shiny "glass" faces for the instruments?

Yes - that's a high degree-of-difficulty stencil job for sure. Really interested to see how that comes out. What material will you cut the masks from?

Love the restrained salt weathering. It was especially effective in cutting down the "newness" contrast between camo and insignia.

Thanks! My talent is modest though; go have a look at Chuck’s Tempest thread if you want some inspirational!

Yeah, that does make sense. I had hoped to avoid destroying and having to redo my own riveting and scribing when I faired up the seams, but now I’m doing that anyway...

I've been working away at the riveting, but have run into a few wing and fuselage section seams popping due to the force I'm having to apply with the rivet wheel. If I was to do this over, or more likely do a whole bunch of similar Special Hobby models in the future because I can't resist the selection of obscure subjects, I would reinforce the insides of the fuselage seams with strips of polystyrene and maybe add some reinforcing spacers inside the wings to prevent them from deforming under stress. Next time. I also built and painted the landing gear, which like most of the rest

I like the white pre-shading strategy under the hinomaru. Gotta remember that one...

The chipping is very nice - a realistic amount and well-placed. What sort of brush or other implements are you using to chip away the green paint with? Too bad about the tape lifting paint around the ailerons. The best solution I’ve come up with for fabric covered control surfaces is to leave them off and paint them separately, only installing them after all paint is complete. Unfortunately this is only helpful if they are separate kit parts, or you want to do the heavy lift of making them so.

From what I read, the early production ones were bare metal and then at some point they changed to paint. I have no idea which way the specific aircraft I am doing was produced, so just guessed green.

Wow wow wow. Amazing precision and dedication to detail. Even at 1/18 this is going above and beyond - it looks like the 1/1 aircraft! I assume you are designing all these photoetch pieces yourself and then having them made? Maybe the full DIY lithography setup can be next on your list ;-)

Started in on rivets. I tried practicing on some sheet styrene and found that my standby guide for scoring panel lines, Dymo tape, doesn't really work as a guide for the rivet wheel - it's too easy for the toothed wheel to climb up the tape. So for the horizontal stabilizers I just drew the rivet pattern on with pencil and then carefully followed it freehand. This was OK on these small pieces that could lay flat on the bench, but I'm feeling that it will be more difficult with the fuselage especially. Maybe I need to look into a small flexible metal

That weathering is really coming together nicely! I have this kit sitting on the shelf; now thinking about moving it up the queue having seen your excellent work.

Continuing with the rear of the plane, the two sides of the vertical stabilizer are also different: There was lots of mismatch around the leading edge of the fin too, but that's already been cleaned up. Holding up the rudder makes it clear that the low side needs to be shimmed. I've also spent a ton of time cleaning up all of the panel lines on both the wing and fuselage. They're almost done now but still need a quick treatment with extra-thin cement to smooth the rough spots that I always seem to get. I didn't take comprehensive "before" photos, a

I've been in "fixing lots of Special Hobby things" mode for a while on the project now, so it feels like I've spent a lot of time for not very much visible progress. Hopefully it is worthwhile in the end. I'm starting to think and research more about the next build, which is a bad sign - can't get distracted and not get this one over the finish line, and there's quite a bit of work yet to do. But first, fixing a mistake I made, rather than Special Hobby. As waroff noted, on the P-36 the gunsight illuminator is mounted low, not in the pilot's line of sight as the Hawks had it. M

Very impressive on those roundels. Both your super-crisp result AND the opacity of the MRP white going down over dark blue. Gotta give those a try...

I ended up putting mine in my office for that exact reason. Between models, woodworking, and my wife’s drawing and sewing hobbies, there was ZERO room for anything else in the basement!