Backdating the Trumpeter P-38J to a P-38G - Paint me like one of your French planes, Jack.

[Citadelgrad]

Sorry you were under the weather, i caught it over the holidays and mine was pretty mild but no fun.

 

this is brave modeling and i share your non love of scribing.  I will just have to live vicariously watching.  
 

looking great.

 

do you worry about the super glue bond?  I agree you got a lot of contact area but i always manage to shock the join whenever i rely on super glue and it comes loose.  Just asking, i am way behind you in the experience department on this.  I have a couple projects coming up that involve resin parts. 
 

this is a great build to watch!

[ChuckD]

Thanks for the kind words.  No, I'm not overly concerned about the bond coming loose.  I've not had that problem too often with CA.  In my case here, for all the CA you see on the outside of the kit, there's 3x the amount on the inside.  I gooped it on in the inside of the nacelles to really help hold everything tight.  With all the manipulating I did today as I was working on it, I think it would have popped loose if it was going to.  

[LSP_Kevin]

Love your never say die attitude on this one, Chuck!

 

Kev

[Greg W]

This is just so awesome, you know somebody really loves the P-38 if they build the Trumpeter kit. But... your not just taming the beast that is the Trumpeter kit, your converting it too.

 

Great job!

[tomp.]

I started one these about a year ago. Fit of resin is not easy. Supercharger intake mod appears to be a bit to small for the trumpie kit, more closely matches the revell kit. I got the SOW landing gear, well worth using it for support. Filled in the over scale divots with Vallejo primer to either remove or reduce. The nacelle plugs are handed, but still don't fit very well. Slowly working away this winter.

[MikeMaben]

Alotta work done well Chuck.  Shaping up nicely.

[Shoggz]

Brave and interesting modelling. I'm enjoying following along!

[Sasha As]

Great job!

[BiggTim]

Nice work, Chuck!! You are inspiring me to get my H conversion off the SOD and get cracking again....

Edited February 20, 2023 by BiggTim

[ChuckD]

Well, get on it, Tim.    These things won't build themselves.

 

Lord knows this one sure hasn't.

 

I had the day off today, so after a round at the gym and a shower, I got to work at the bench.  I was really happy with the alignment of the booms and tail assembly, so I decided to cement the tail together.  With this nice and solid, I figured it would help guide and keep in alignment the next, and most treacherous part of the conversion.  I glued the booms together at the tail and held them in place with tape till they set nicely.  Nothing on this kit has been a product of subtlety and the tail was no exception.

 

While that was drying, I took copious measurements with digital calipers.  The most helpful was to measure a reference line from the aft of the turbo deck cutout and a panel line juuuust behind the tape in the pic above, right near the root of the vertical stabs.  That was my reference for how long the tail assembly had to be.  

 

Here's the resin part compared to the boom in the kit.  The plan was to cut the booms off then sand them down to the panel lines that roughly line up with the panel lines in the resin parts.  The doctor is in.  Let's begin the procedure.

 

Incision number 1

 

Incision number 2.  We now have a travel-size P-38.

 

Incision number 3

 

And the final cut.

 

I then took my tamiya cutters and roughed in the cut closer to the target panel line.  I finished carefully with a sanding stick.  This is during the work with the cutters.

 

Mating the two resin halves together showed that the fit was hilariously bad.  I think it's quite likely that this resin was originally designed for the Revell P-38, so its fit here was awful.

 

As I hemmed and hawed on how to line everything up properly, I had one of my (unfortunately rare) moments of sheer brilliance.  Super gluing a couple balsa rods to the inside of the booms brought structural integrity and ensured the the length would be exactly right.  From here, it would just be a matter of shaping the resin pieces to fit the now rigid open space.

 

After much fiddling, I determined that the best approach would be to mate the two resin pieces at the top center then fill the canyon on the bottom of the boom.  Here you can see that in doing so, the fit on the tops and sides of the booms wasn't so bad.

 

See?  Not too shabby.

 

Not too shabby.

 

Shabby.

 

After some more filling with CA and an initial round of sanding, I'm pretty pleased with the rough results.

 

I back filled the gap with styrene so that I could more effectively fill it with epoxy putty.

 

I think the patient just may pull through!

 

While I'm waiting for the epoxy putty on the bottom of the booms to harden, I turned my attention to cleaning up the underside of the wings where the dive flap equipment was removed.  I also made a rough pass at creating the in-wing landing light.  It got a little messy and will need a little cleanup, but it turned out well.  Somehow, I was able to make a perfect lens using melted clear sprue on the first try.  After heating the end of a rod of sprue, I squished it vertically on my workbench.  To my utter amazement, it turned out to be the perfect size and the perfect depth to fill the hole.  

 

If I'm not mistaken, I'm now done with the major conversion work.  From here out, it's just putting stuff together, filling holes, lines, and seams, scribing and riveting.  

[LSP_Kevin]

Very nice solution, Chuck! This is my kind of modelling, and for what it's worth, I think you took the right approach. Looking forward to more updates!

 

Kev

[MikeMaben]

[Thomas Lund]

Hi Chuck

 

I didn't notice your post until now... when I saw it I started racing through it to see if you got to the boom/cooler inserts and warn you about it... too late 

 

I cut the booms before joining them and found that I got the best fit against the boom by shimming both top and bottom. But whatever works for you 

 

You gave me a little info about some G/H differences I didn't know about - thanks. The wing support info came too late though...

 

Excellent work so far !! 

 

BTW my conversion seems to only have the NLG mirror on the right part... maybe the left was lost in sanding, entirely possible with this conversion

[tucohoward]

Really nice work, Chuck! Very entertaining:)

 

Jay

[ChuckD]

Hello, everyone.  Back at the bench after something of a hiatus.  Life has thrown a few curveballs at me that have kept me from getting much time to work on my hobbies.  First, power and internet outages in the face of a few heavy midwestern winter storms.  Then, I've been spending most of my free time looking for a new job.  I recently took a promotion into a key leadership spot in my company, and as it turns out, it was akin to stepping into an abusive relationship.  So, I put in my two weeks' notice yesterday.  Anyone looking for a highly experienced IT leader, lemme know.

 

In what time I've had at the bench lately, I've been working on getting the cockpit around.  I have the eduard detail sets, so I used some of those, and scratch built a few things as well to make it look more like a P-38G.  That said, I didn't find a pic of the radio deck for a G model until after I'd more or less finished, so the radio stack may or may not be correct.  Meh.  No one will really know.  

 

These pictures are before any washing or weathering.  

 

Though it looks kinda crappy under the super zoom of my phone, the charging handle for the guns was the primary scratch build item for the IP.  The layout of the instruments between the G and the J/L changed quite a bit, but I didn't have it in me to scratch build an entirely different panel.  So, we'll go with what we've got here.

 

The eduard seatbelt set.  I strongly prefer the HGW sets.  I always find that the PE of the eduard sets doesn't conform to the shape of the seat without popping pieces loose or kinking unnaturally.  But, still, better than nothing and, when weathered a bit, it looks the part.

 

The yoke was the most obvious visual change from the G to the J/L models.  I cut the original yoke off and scratched up this one.  Again, when in situ, it looks quite nice.

 

When I started fitting the cockpit tub (which I forgot to take pictures of, naturally) into the wing halves, I found that the radio deck sagged.  That left a gap between the rear bulkhead and the upper wing half.  So, I glued in a piece of sprue to help force it upwards and it took up the gap nicely.

 

After quite a bit of cementing, super gluing, leaving traces of my thumbprint on plastic, taping, hoping, praying, and so on, this is where I'm at today.  The turbo decks are dry fit and will be my next target.  Once I get those smoothed in, I'll start the process of filling, sanding, scribing, and riveting.

 

The completed cockpit tub.  Looking pretty nice if I do say so myself.

 

The under side with all control surfaces attached.  Fortunately, I learned from Other Chuck's build log and labeled each flap section as to its placement.  They are all nearly identical, but nooooooot quite.  

 

As others have seen, here is the expected canyon that needs to be filled.  I'll be following Other Chuck's method on this to fill and sand.  At least the wing dihedral is correct.

 

Here's what the bottom of the intake sections look like after being filled with Magic Sculpt and sanded.  Much better.

 

So that's where we are today, folks.  Making good progress in getting this ol' bird done.  Now that it's all together, it actually feels pretty solid, so that's encouraging.