Alex

I always do this, because I see other people do it, and then wonder after I'm done with paint, decals, weathering, etc if I can see any of it at all. Maybe I will try NOT doing it for a while...

Eduard replacement cowl flaps. I wish I had decided to use these before assembling the fuselage. Thinning down the plastic to let these sit flush when installed would have been much easier to do on the individual parts.

Partway through I decided I needed some exterior photoetch details. Still to do right at the end will be the links connecting the wheelwell covers to to the main and tailwheel struts.

Airframe pretty much built and ready for paint.

Do it! It's a pretty reasonable kit. Couple things to look out for are the fit of the fuselage over the cowl machine gun breeches and the obviously too-shallow cockpit (which I just ignored).

Nice wiring! Both engine and cockpit are really benefitted by it.

Hiding from coronavirus = lots more time than I usually have to spend on model airplanes. Almost everything is assembled and ready for paint. Just some seam fixing and touch-up scribing left. Plus I need to trim, Future, and mask the canopy. I went over all the panel seams lightly with a scriber, hoping to help them "grab" a little more wash when the time comes - they were kind of soft for this scale as molded by Trumpeter. We'll see how that works out - every one of these is a learning experience. I have the Osprey AVG Flying Tiger Aces book as a painting reference, which is great because it has some period color photos from China/Burma. As you all know color photos from the front in WWII are like hen's teeth, especially from the Pacific. It is nice to be able to get a sense of how sun-faded these birds really were. It looks like the brown color especially is bunch lighter that the paint chip for that color (I have the FS number somewhere) is. One other silly bit about this kit - Trumpeter has provided some "movable" parts, most notably the rudder, which if you tried to implement it would just sag badly. Needless to say I just glued it in place. Same with the rotating wheels.

Dennis, I have my eye on a Buffalo as well. When I move on in my little project to the disastrous (for the Allies) Java Sea campaign, the emblematic Allied plane has to be the obsolete and out-gunned Buffalo. Either in RAF or Dutch colors; not sure yet. For the Japanese plane, I'm actually thinking about getting a conversion kit to turn a Zero into a 1/32 Nate float plane. These were ubiquitous (all the cruisers carried them) and made it trivially easy for the Japanese Navy to flatten the attempts at ABDA naval resistance.

Thanks! Looking forward to learning from all the great work here.

If I stay motivated beyond this one and the Ki-27 that will go with it, I might back up even earlier and do an A5M2 Claude (already have the kit stashed) alongside a Chinese Nationalist Polikarpov I-16. Back to the Sino-Japanese roots of the conflict, as it were.

One more

Another. It's well known (and obvious when you build it) that the cockpit in this kit is way too shallow. I decided I don't care enough to mess with it. I'm going more for evoking history than for blueprint accuracy...

OK, hosting the images on FB seems to work

In-progress photos of my Trumpeter P-40B build. This is the first model in an over-ambitious project to build a bunch of 1/32 single-seat warbirds with an "adversaries" theme - planes of pilots who faced off against each other over the course of the Pacific War (my area of interest). My desire here was to have a "real" Flying Tiger - a P-40B still wearing Nationalist Chinese livery, before the Tigers were "conscripted" back into the USAAF. The Trumpeter kit only has decals for USAAF planes, so I had to hunt down a Kits-World decal sheet that would do. This plane will eventually be paired with a Ki-27 of the 77th Sentai, which the Tigers battled in numerous engagements during the Japanese capture of Burma. The kit comes with a very nice model of the Allison V-12, which I couldn't bear to close up where it couldn't be seen, so I sawed out a couple of access panels, which will sit in place with tiny neodymium magnets so they can be removed once the thing is built. Actually I may not do this if I can't figure out how to post photos. Apparently they can't be linked from Google...