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Showing results for tags 'curtiss'.
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Never having laid claim to a mind of sense or reason, reading the reports of how terrible Infinity Models' first venture into injection molded territory was, awoke something in my few remaining brain-cells. With every word of admonishment that adorned build review, just like that red flag to a bull, I wondered what sort of a Worst-Kit-Ever was hiding within the quite large box. Looking over the sprues revealed a interesting combination of raised and engraved details, miles of flash and plenty of mould release lines. One curious detail was that whilst some parts were (randomly) numbered on the sprues, others had no numbering at all. A check of thr sprue layout in the instructions cleared up which part was supposedly which, but more on that later. Whilst infinity offers all manner of add-on detail kits, I like my models closed up, preserving the shape of the aircraft, so luckily those won't be a further hindrance of dragging this kit across the finish line. One addition I do think needs be made, is the PE dive flaps. They're a fairly costly necessity, but given the fragile, multi-layered nature of these flaps in real life, compared to the somewhat representative blobs of plastic provided in the kit, I think they're a must for anyone contemplating this build. Other than these and a set of Master perforated gun barrels for the rear guns, I'm aiming to go OOTB with this. The plan is to build the 3 tone paint scheme (or something similar) as provided in the kit. On to the plastic! Denzil
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Hi all, Some say that a modeller‘s life is like city buses. One can wait for a bus for hours, and when one finally comes along, they come in 3 or 4 I’ve been anticipating for the GWH P-40 B/C since it was announced last year. I thought that given the enthusiastic reception, there would sooner or later be a WIP thread dedicated to the subject on this here forum. I waited and waited …until three weeks ago, I took the plunge and ordered my kit from a Czech shop. Five days later, it arrived. I ripped open the box and started right away… only to find that @Tolga ULGUR beat me to it. To tell you the truth, I’m not entirely unfamilar with the early Hawk. I scoured the internet for my build of the 1/48 Airfix kit, and learned a lot from the various Curtiss experts. Furthermore I’m currently building a 1/32 French H75, the forefather of the H81. So I felt I was somewhat ready for the GWH. My intention is to build a 112 sqn RAF Tomahawk in early temperate camouflage and sporting one of the original sharkmouths. I’ve studied this scheme for my 1/48 model and will take the opportunity to implement it to the larger scale. Since no decals exist, the markings will be hand-painted à la old-school (no Silhouette). Some views of my 1/48 Airfix. I’ll use the same color scheme for the GWH. Hopefully, with cleaner teeth This thread is not meant to be a step-by-step WIP per se but rather a log where I’d be gathering notes and impressions (and rants) during the building of this promising kit! I hope some of you will find it at least entertaining and I also welcome your comments and input. The more the merrier. A VERY brief preview of the kit as all of you know already about it. THE PROS: very clean mouldings, realistic surface textures with intricate, accurate details, very precise fit with super-tight tolerance. Very comprehensive decals, thin and well-printed. THE CONS: the photo-etchings are useless and primitive at best. Paper-thin, easily deformed, devoid of noticeable details. Some etched parts would better be in moulded plastic. The etched radiator grills are commendably thin and subtle if only they can be seen once the kit is completed. Furthermore the special edition ‘bonus’ -apart from the 3d-printed .303 barrels- are completely useless: a bogus patch (if only had they use a genuine Flying Tigers breast patch), a ‘collector’s card (tell me how many collect 150euro kits), and 2 posters profiles(meh). I would prefer GWH replace these ‘bonus’ with some etched seat belts and optional US seats and windscreens. Rants aside. Let’s cut plastic. Starting with the cockpit. I prefer to do it the ‘normal’ way. Instead of building a pilot’s cage as GWH proposed, I’d be gluing the right and left sides to their respective fuselage halves. This method would give me a complete view of what’s in store, especially giving the adequate contrast when detailing and painting the cockpit. I added an armour plate ( plasticard) to the bulkhead behind the seat The original cockpit was painted in an equivalent of RAF Grey-green. I used AK grey-green slightly modified with a touch of blue. The aft fuselage is painted in a yellow Zinc Chromate. This part is not visible on the completed airframe. I only painted it to give some contrast to the cockpit color. Cockpit floor (in fact, the top of the wing) painted. Note ‘halo’ effect. Supposed to give some depth to the cockpit. Hopefully Seat is painted in a slightly darker green than the rest. As this is a RAF bird, I added a Sutton harness (Eduard p.e.) Instrument panel waiting for bezel decals. That’s it, folks. Questions and comments are heartily welcome! Cheers, Quang
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The September 1939 campaign in Poland made it clear to the Dutch that they are completely unprepared for the conditions of modern war. They needed fighters. However, the queue with orders for the fighter aircraft was already long. France, Great Britain did not have much to offer for sale, they were in need themselves and bought them in emergency mode. The United States became the natural direction, where at the last moment Dutch managed to buy 24 Curtiss H-75 in the A7 version, for which the base was the A4, equipped with a powerful and light, yet capricious, Wright Cyclone engine - but also the fastest version of the P-36. They were produced in parallel with machines for France. However, before they reached their destination - the Netherlands fell under the attack of the Third Reich. The Hawks was therefore sent to the Dutch East Indies, to Andir (near Bandung), where they arrived in May 1940. After being assembled, flown and painted, they were sent to Madiun (East Java), where they were to defend the Surabaya naval base. The Dutch Hawks' service was short and lacking in success. After the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941, the aircraft were sent to Sumatra. They were flown from there without successes, but with victims, one of which was the pilot of the plane that you see in the gallery. On December 21, 1941, two Hawks collided during the take-off to the combat action over Western Malaya. Sergeant Paulus Casper van Breen, then a 24-year-old ML-KNIL pilot, sat behind the controls of one of them, with the serial number C329. He died on the spot. Source: https://oorlogsgravenstichting.nl/persoon/20084/paulus-casper-van-breen After the fall of Sumatra, at the beginning of February 1942, the aircraft were re-directed to Madiun, where they unsuccessfully tried to stop the Japanese air raids on Surabaya, which, however, in fights with the Zeros only resulted in the loss of five more machines and further casualties. Other planes were grounded due to defective engines and lack of spare parts, and after the Japanese invasion of Java, destroyed by the Dutch in early March 1942. The Special Hobby's kit is well worth the manufacturer's brand. Special in every aspect: quality of the molds, fit, level of details, accuracy. And isn't our hobby (inter alia) a struggle against the efforts of producers, how to do something wrong, if it could be good. So everything is all right. If you are interested in details and have strong nerves, please look for the workshop thread. The construction process was marked by numerous problems, caused by myself. First the fuselage broke twice where it was connected to the engine cowling, then after assembling the airframe and painting, I dropped it on the desk and the instrument panel inside fell off ... reinstalling it perfectly did not succeed, poor access, but I didn't want to make such a large step back and brake the fuselage into halves. Decals were too transparent, had to overpaint them. I broke one leg of the landing gear, lost one gear leg cover (the one in the front of the gear nacelle, finally I made them both of an aluminium sheet obtained from a tin of Felix peanuts), I lost the fuel filler cap too, replaced with a scratch-built one. At the end I unfortunately grabbed it with dirty fingers and the marks had to be removed ... But finally, here it is. Here it is and it proves that even with medium abilities and skills in the use of putty and file, this model can be put together. And this is probably the most important thing. Few things added: rivets, missing panel lines, modification of armament in the wings, antenna mountings on the wings, vertical stabilizer and fuselage, 0.2 mm Uschi van der Rosten antenna cables with insulators made of hygienic stick stretched over fire (does anyone use them for any other purpose, btw?), wheel well covers from CMK resin, barrels from Master. The rest - straight from the box. Painted with MRP Paints. Colors according to the AJ-Press monograph: old leaves - early US Olive Drab, young leaves - early US Medium Green, underside of wings and horizontal fins painted silver, with upper surface color over the leading edge. In combination with the orange markings - it looks very nice and different, I think. Hope you like it :). Best regards and Happy New Year! Hubert
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my last buit , enjoy : voila voila
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Finally it's done ! I've started it more than one year ago, but most of the time it stayed on my bench half built and untouched. I restarted it a few weeks ago, and was very happy to meet this model again. It was a pleasure to build for a resin kit, with a very good fit and a very few issue (maybe the only issues were my fault). The painting was not easy though, as i had to cut masks for everything, and the yellow wings also ask for a lot of masking. Yellow is definitely not an easy color to paint. It is almost translucent, and even the tiniest bit of dust is visible. The olive drab color is a mix with british dark earth and US olive drab, to get something a bit khaki. The white is also a mix to get something more creamy, and the yellow as well (pure yellow + a bit of orange). Of course it's straight of the box, except a few things, like the antennas, and of course the rigging. This aircraft is not the easiest to rig, especially just in front of the cockpit, as there is a very few space between the upperwing and the engine cowling. It's a bit like building a boat model in a bottle. The control cables are EZ line, the structure rigging is Prym flat elastic wire and the antennas are Uschi elastic wire. The turnbuckles are basically brass microtube cut to lenght, and they are not present everywhere as some rigging points were inside of the fuselage. Now i can jump on the next build to be finished, and i think it will be another Curtiss bird, as i have a P-36A about 75% build. Here is a link to the WIP thread : http://forum.largescaleplanes.com/index.php?showtopic=54237
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Hi, After the P-6E and the P-36A (still in progress) I continue my Curtiss series. In fact, i've started this build more than 1 year ago, maybe even more. But i swore to finish 2 builds for 1 started until i empty my shelf of doom. So i'm back with this one. Once the cockpit will be built and the fuselage enclosed, it would not be too long i guess. I use the hasegawa old BF2C kit, with the Lone Star Model Hawk III conversion (3 blades propeller + engine cowling + a few fuselage parts around the tail wheel) and resin cockpit. For some reasons, i rebuilt the instrument panel from scratch and will certainly be detailing a few parts in the cockpit (at least the throttle handles). First here is the instrument panel. This picture is one from a F11C, but i assume it is the same : And my own version : After a coat of paint and a few dial decals, i'm pretty sure it would look good. I've also started to work on the engine. Unfortunately, there is an important mould offset. I have a nice Vector resin engine, but i prefer to keep it for another build (F11C and BF2C to come next....) where it will be more visible. Indeed the Hawk III engine cowling is more "wrapping" and hide a bit more the engine. So i am going to use the kit engine. I had to use new push rods as the kit ones also suffered from the very important offset = unusable. I will have to make the ignition wires, too. ANd with the cowling slide on it (one has to cut the cowling for it to fit over the engine. The engine also has to be heavilly sanded to reduce the diameter because of the rockers casings) : The strange engineering for the lower wings also had to be corrected. Instead making simple 2 half wings as usual, Hasegawa chose to make this strange cutting. It just makes a bad joint in the middle of the wing. And because of the wing details, it's not easy to sand it clean without damaging everything. I used rolls of sanding paper. I will get back to the P-36. More to come later !
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Hi ! My last finished build. Like most of my last models, it has been started for a while, but was put aside to build something else. So it's the Special Hobby P-36A Pearl Harbor defender kit, built OOB. I just corrected the gunsight, buidling from scratch a new correct gunsight + reflector, thanks to Waroff's informations. Same for the windscreen rods. The painting was done with Alclad gloss black base thouroughly polished and then some AK interactive mixes, mostly based on polished aluminium. The decal set is from Yellow Wings, very nice set, but the decal quality (Microscale) was really not impressive. Nothing comparable with Microscale Cartograf (sorry for the typo !), Fantasy Print Shop or the Special Hobby printer (dont know who it is, but they are always very good !). The colors on the engine cowling were painted as i was sure try to apply the decals here would have ended as a drama. It's the Group commanders aircraft, so it wears the colors of the 3 pursuit squadrons of 20th PG. Nothing special to say about this build. It's not very easy as there are a lot of fit issues, especially as the fuselage is designed for 2 different engines, with different front parts, and it's a bit tricky to make all of this fitting correctly. But nothing impossible with a bit of CA, putty and sanding paper. Here is a link to the WIP thread, if interested : http://forum.largescaleplanes.com/index.php?showtopic=57403?st=0
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