1:72 Hasegawa P2V-5 Lockheed Neptune

[Builder 2010]

I mentioned this model in my Apache thread, and thought I might as well post it in it's entirety. The back story is about my wife's first cousin, Larry. For no special reason, they had stopped interacting years ago, and recently reconnected. I learned things about his background that I never knew. I knew that he worked for years at Boeing Vertol building Chinooks, and working in manufacturing, but didn't know that he was in the US Navy in the early 1960s serving as a flight chief on a P2V-5 Neptune. His plane was the one that dropped the first nuclear depth charge. I offered to build his plane for him. He sent me photos from which I could derive the plane and squadron numbers. I found an old kit on eBay for $45. It's a vintage kit in all of its shortcomings.

I'm totally spoiled. All my recent builds are with high tech modern plastic (not counting my custom builds) with spectacular detail, recessed panel lines and rivets, perfect fits and great engineering. This kit, sad to say, is none of these. Fits weren't good, detail was lacking, raised panel lines and poor engineering. But it's a plane that was not modeled much with the only other one being a 1960s Revell kit, which had to be worse. So I soldiered on and am building the kit. It only has four pages of instructions, and resides on three sprues. I will have it finished next week and will be delivering it along with the delivery of the 5"38 project to the BB New Jersey.

Making custom decals with white in them was the most challenging part of the job. Ink jet printers can't print white! To do so you print the decal on white background decal paper. That's okay if you are printing Stars and Bars where the white is contained within the graphic where you can razor cut the decal out of the background paper. But when the white IS the decal, such as the "NAVY" lettering, you have two choices: razor cut each letter and apply them one at a time. Good luck with that one. Or print the decal on a background that exactly matches the plane's base color and trim the decal wider. If you get the match right, the decal background basically disappears. This is easier said than done.

The steps are:

1. Paint a sample of the back ground color.
2. Scan the sample
3. Import the scan into your graphics program, in my case CorelDraw 2021
4. Print the scan on glossy photo paper that closely matches the white decal paper in highest resolution
5. Examine print against sample. They WILL NOT MATCH!
6. With the color selection set for CMYK, adjust the colors to bring the color closer. Make at least four samples varying the colors that you think get you close. Be sure to document the CMYK numbers so you can repeat the best match.
7. Repeat this step as many times as you need to get the match. It takes a lot of patience and it's probably not going to be exact.
8. When you think you've got it, print the decals out on the decal paper. Decal paper is expensive so I usually wait as long as I can before committing to printing on it. Even with that, I find that under different lighting conditions, the colors shift and don't look as they did where you printed it.

Notice that I put black behind the JET INTAKE that's the nose of the jet engines. Otherwise I would have to razor cut those red edges to remove the white outside. Some of the decals, like the "Propeller" warning line passes from the gray to the white areas on the fuze. Since the decal's already on white, I don't need a background on it, but I did need it on the part over the gray, otherwise, I'd be trimming a very narrow decal that would fail.

To ensure that the decals are correctly sized, I draw them directly on top of a scanned decal set. I import them into CorelDraw at full size. I missed one of the decals since the orginal, old decals were very yellowed and the small NAVY decal was very hard to see.

Larry sent me a picture of his squadron insignia which was on a plaque and photoed at an oblique angle so I couldn't trace directly over it. I found the insignia on the web and used that. Larry had the insignia made and had it on both sides of the planes nose. It took an entire morning to draw that decal.

This is the patch in 1:72. I printed a bunch.

Raised panel lines make it impossible to fill seams without destroyed detail. And this plane had a lot of seams to fill. The canopy and nose glazing had to be hand masked. I have no problem with that and used Tamiya Curvy Masking tape. It's actually white vinyl (electrical?) tape that's narrow and will stretch over compound curves nicely.

Sanding the seams obliterated the surface details, but with Tamiya filler, this was necessary.

All the subassemblies were built off the model. One of the gear parts, the brace, had to be trapped between the two back nacelle halves. Almost forgot to do this since the instructions were a bit vague.

The engines lack details, but you hardly can see them in the tightly cowled engine.

Yesterday, I got all of it put together ready for the first coat of primer. I'm going to prime the upper, white surface, with Tamiya white, and the rest with Tamiya gray. Originally, I was led to believe, by the instructions, that the color was Glossy Sea Blue. However, Larry informed me that his plane was Gray. More research showed that the later colors was Glossy Engine Gray. I took the blue back to the hobby shop and got the correct color. It's a tough gray to match.

I painted the NATO black fore part of the radar dome, but forgot to do the same for the anti-glare panel on the nose. I did that this morning. I will mask both of these surfaces before doing the primer paint.

The tailpipe region on the jets is ALLClad light burned metal, overcoated with Stainless Steek moving forward from the exhaust.

One of my blog readers informed me that there are some differenes between the -5 (Larry's plane) and the later -7 version. Primarily, the canopy is raised on the -7 since they raised the pilot's seat for better forward visibility a la, the later Corsairs. The radar dome was moved 4' forward. Some -5 versions show no jets, but Larry's plane had them. They also went from the R3350-30W to R3350-32W with slightly higher horsepower, but both were turbo-compouds with the same exhaust layout. I'm not going to attempt to make thse mods and Larry's okay with that. The fact that he's going to a have a nice model of a plane with all the correct markings. He said, "It brings a tear to my eye." so I'm assuming he's happy.

 

[Wurger]

 

[SaparotRob]

The Neptune is a favorite of mine. Growing up in Brooklyn, we lived near NASNY, aka Floyd Bennett Field. P2Vs were stationed there. I would always stop what I was doing when I heard military aircraft. I would watch the Neptunes fly overhead. In the evening and nighttime, I could see the blue exhaust flames, just as Martin Caidin wrote.

 

[Gnomey]

Lovely work so far!

 

[Builder 2010]

I'm on a short time schedule hoping to finish it all by this Thursday. I think I'll make it barring any ridiculous, unforeseen events. There may be one brewing with the multi-part propellers. Time will tell.

I painted the white primer, then Tamiya Gloss white for the surfaces that are white. My wife's cousin sent a better picture of his plane in flight that I could use for the masking and decal placement. Notice that the white/gray demarcation line takes a step at the rear cabin window.

I had overlooked Larry's #5 Plane Number. I drew that up today, printed it, and overcoated it with Rust-oleum clear gloss. This stuff really dries shiny and fast.

I got the white surfaces masked. Took quite awhile since it follows the wing roots and I used the White Vinyl tape for that.

I painted all the Glossy Gray. When it went on I almost had a heart attack. It was many slides lighter than the decal color. But after force drying it a bit with the heat gun, it darkened considerably and will work okay.

Like Vallejo acrylic, the Mission Models paint flashes off pretty quickly, but stays tacky for a long time. I like Tamiya better. When it flashes off it's dry. I left it in this position for a while until I could handle it wearing nitrile gloves.

I then pulled the tape. Most was okay, but I discovered the difficulty of masking white paint with white vinyl tape. I missed a spot! Ugh!. I will mask the tail tomorrow and shoot some gloss white to repair. The paint will dry quick enough.

I also found upon further inspection, there were also some lighter gray spots, which I brush painted. I may have to do more touchup tomorrow.

I'm also finding that the Mission paint does not adhere as well as I would like it. Again, I don't seem to have that problem with Tamiya. I've been using Tamiya for 50 years.

The jets look decent. I'm holding off de-masking the clear parts until all the touch up work is done.

I finished the session building (or should I say, "attempting to build") the propellers. Upon first glance it was nice that the blades and hub assembly were separate parts. In retrospect, it is NOT! The pins on the props are too small and the blades fit sloppily and flop around. I'm trying to find the correct glue to put it together. The spinner is two parts, and the back part fell off during all the fussing. I just put it aside until tomorrow before I wrecked it. For 1/72 a fully molded prop would have been just fine.

 

[Wurger]

 

[Vic Balshaw]

What you have managed to do so far looks great.

 

[Gnomey]

Lovely work so far!

 

[Builder 2010]

Today wasn't such a good day! I spent more time repairing than building. I had to do my metal pin magic to fasten a prop blade that lost the very weak and tiny pin that was supposed to hold it. I had to scratch-build one of the two nose gear doors after one had fallen off the sprue and may have been swept up and thrown out when I cleaned the floor. I was wrestling with the landing gear and not happy how they were going on. I had no idea how you were suppose to glue on the open gear doors. I re-glued the glass dome over the spotlight three times.

And then things really got bad. I had the model basically complete. I measured the distance from a surface to the underside of the tail to make a clear support stick since the model was very tail heavy. It would have taken more than an ounce of weight to bring the nose down, and since I had forgotten to add weight before closing it all up, options were limited. I was about to turn down one end of the plastic stick and somehow (I really don't know how), I bumped the model and it hit the FLOOR. I blew off the canopy, the spotlight lens (again!), some of the gear doors, and totally wrecked two out of three landing gears. NOT SALVAGABLE! And you know I can recover from almost anything. Not this time. There was a bright spot. I got all the decals on, AND FINALLY got the color background right. I had to reprint the #5 that sits below the canopy and the Rescue arrows were too big.

To replace the broken prop pin, I had to take a slightly different approach. The cross-section of the prop was too narrow to successfully drill it to insert a pin. Instead, I ground a groove in the back face and CA'd the prop to a much larger pin that fit into the large hole in the spinner. It worked.

After touching up the mess, I had two good props. I find it interesting the prop tips are clipped a la those on a turbo-prop.

I also painted the wheels, but alas, they will not be used.

I had to scratch-build one nose gear door. As I note above, I think I swept it up and tossed it. I used .020" and .015. Later I found that the kit's outer door thickness is .030".

I didn't take any pictures will the gear and doors in place. I had a terrible time mounting the doors. There really was no viable gluing surface and it was annoying. Edge gluing thin stock is always dubious and this was no exception. I was warned that it would sit on its tail and it sure did.

This was what the model looked like after gravity had its way with it. I dropped models before, but this was the first time that unrecoverable damage ocurred.

I examined the gear to see if I could work any magic, but could not. Closing the gear doors was not so easy either. There is no purchase to keep them from just falling into the wheel well. First I had to glue the two halves together and this involved sraping all the set Gel CA, and removing any paint where the joint would be. Then I needed to reinforce the joint since gluing 0.030" edges together is a recipe for failure. The lip was .060" across so I used a piece of .060" X .060" styrene to beef it up. For some miraculous reason, the props didn't get damaged. If they got whacked, I would have to either scrap the whole deal or make clear plastic disks with motion lines to simulate rotating props.

I tried fitting the assembled doors into their respective openings. They sort-of fit, but there's nothing upon which to attach them.

To that end, I added some structure into the wheel wells to keep the doors from simply falling inside. These little struts will serve that purpose, but they may need more structure to provide enough gluing surface. Right now there's practically none. MiniCraft didn't do any engineering about how these doors were going to be held, whether open or closed.

I trimmed the supports so they would let the doors sit flush.

Without landing gear the model's going to need some kind of stand or else be hung from the ceiling. I think Larry's going to want to be able to see it. I'm going to design and 3D print an acceptable stand worthy of the model. That work is going to take me past tomorrow and therefore, I will not finish the model on time to get it him for this trip. I was pressing too hard and that's probably why I was having the problems anyway. I wasn't happy with the landing gear. They were weak and flimsy and would have broken most likely. I'm not just espousing sour grapes. I've done so much touch up painting, the plane is starting to look very real.

 

[Vic Balshaw]

You have been through the wars with this one but it is all a good learning cure and "yes" you have kept your sanity, so well done.

 

[Wurger]