Academy 1/72 P-40B

the Baron

Ich bin ja, Herr, in Deiner Macht
Joined
May 12, 2009
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Well, it's the old Frog kit, really. I didn't know that at the time, but when I learned that Academy reboxed that old kit, it explained a lot.

I got this as the "get one" in a "buy one-get one free" sale at my local HobbyTown. The kit I bought was the Tom Daniel Red Baron hot rod from Monogram. The Academy P-40 was the same or less than the hot rod, so it was eligible. I like P-40s, and I like the Flying Tigers, so I picked it up. That was nearly 10 years ago.

Fast-forward to 2017. I belong to a local club that meets every other Wednesday, so I pulled this out of the stash, intending to finish it between meetings. We know how that goes, right? Actually, it went together relatively quickly, though I grew disappointed with the relatively primitive details. The fairings on the nose guns were square in cross-section! I've said elsewhere that I'm not a rivet counter, but I do like a little more authentic detail than Frog provided in this kit. But as it turned out, when I finished it, I was unsatisfied with the results. Since the kit is available, cheap, I picked up a second one and finished that one, too, trying to improve on what I did with the first one. So I ended up with two 1/72 P-40Bs:

DSCN5345.jpg

DSCN5346.jpg

DSCN5347.jpg

DSCN5348.jpg

The one on the right in each photo is the second one.

Yes, the decals were pretty bad. You can see the national roundels and the tricolors on the wheel hub covers are badly out of register. The shark mouth needed cutting to get it to conform to the contours of the nose, too. And lots of setting solution.

In the end, though, I had fun building it, tackling the little issues. I scratched the fairings for the nose guns on the first one, because I lost one of the kit parts when I tried to round it over. I used a piece of sprue, sliced at an angle, to give me the fairing shape. On the second kit, I managed to sand them to shape without losing them.

Comments/criticisms are welcome, and thanks for looking!
 
What do you mean the gun fairings were square ?
They are pretty rectilinear on the B .
I can't tell what's up from these photos ,, can you post a close-up or 2 of the gun fairings ?
 
On the real aircraft, the fairings are curved in cross-section, almost a parabolic curve, largest at the front, where the blast tubes protrude, tapering to the trailing edge. Frog molded the parts as square in cross-section. When you looked at them head-on, you saw a square. I don't have any other pics, unfortunately.
 
Right. Notice how the fairings are rounded on top? On the Frog/Academy kit, those sides form right-angled edges with the top of the fairings, forming a flat top, and a square profile. That's what I mean. I had to round them over.
 
Uber nice job Deiner!! I have always loved this plane.
It's so crazy how the guns work on that aircraft, right!?
To depend on the timing chain to keep you from
shooting your own prop off!! Kinda scary!!!!
David S.
 
Nicely done. I built this kit as well, and shared it on the Agape modeling forum and you may have seen it there. The decals really are a mess, with the white being printed outside of the area they need to be. The nice thing with mine though, is that after the final clear coat went down, the decals really looked painted-on and they did not look like decals at all.

Academy has a newer P-40 in 72nd scale... the P-40N. I have had trouble finding it here in Japan.

I am currently (slowly) working on the Hobby Boss P-40. This one too has Charles Older's #68 from the Hell's Angels. It has great exterior detail, but the interior is a joke. It's a snap kit, and the cockpit interior is all a part of the upper fuselage. There is no instrumentation, and instead there is just a concave curve. I thought about maybe using some styrene sheet to try to do a half-assed representation of what's supposed to be there, but I figured it wasn't worth it. The decals on it seem very nice and crisply printed, at least.
 

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