A few kits which are rarer than they should be

[Schweik]

I found one of those rare Hasegawa SBD-3 kits, which looks pretty good just checking it out in the box, and also manged to snag "Sova-M" IAR-80CA to go with the P.11, which has remarkably nice box art.

These two are next so I'll post them here when I finish them.

 

[Schweik]

Couple more I forgot to mention...

A Macchi 202 (an old Italieri kit i found on Ebay) and an Re-2001 (an also pretty old "Super Model" kit found on Amazon)

Both of those were fairly simple kits but not too hard to build, had a little bit of a fit issue with the Reggiane. Very happy with how both of them came out.



Overall conclusion on the last few months of modeling both rare and common kits, first a brief evaluation of companies for the benefit of people who were like I was about 6 months ago, that is to say clueless about the current state of modeling.

The best kits I got were from:

Zvezda
This Russian company makes excellent 'snap together' kits from my perspective both in terms of accuracy and ease of assembly. I expected not so great quality because of the whole snap together thing but they turned out to be top quality. Their newer kits also have good, clear instructions and good decals. I made their Fw 190, Yak 3, and Bf 109F2, and I have their Ju 88 which I'm looking forward to making (though it looks like a beast of an assembly just because there is so much to it!). Only downside from my perspective is that they haven't made that many WW2 kits. I've held off on getting their P-39 and Tomahawk only because I already have examples of those planes. I wish they would do more WW2 kits especially in 1/72.

Airfix
UK's Airfix is one of the great mainline middle level companies. Their older kits can be a bit crude but they are doing these new-tool kits now days which are excellent. I know most people in this forum are grognards who know far more than I, but for those neophytes or guys getting back into this like me, my main recommendation for Airfix is to look for the new tool kits - the older ones are definitely showing their age. Some older ones are reboxed with new looking artwork so it definitely warrants a google search and / or reading reviews. Obviously being a UK company these are the go-to for most of your rarer English aircraft and lend lease planes in heavy use by the RAF. I made their new-tool Beautighter which was superb and am looking forward to doing one of their new Tomahawk kits. They also have good clear instructions and good decals. Only complaint is I wish they would do more of the Pacific, Russian Front, and Med Theater especially the later years and stick to the 1/72 (like everybody they seem to be moving more into 1/48 scale now days). But their focus is on the English experience of the War and they do that quite well.

Hasegawa
Basically I see Hasegawa as the Japanese Airfix. They make fairly inexpensive good quality kits which are pretty accurate and easy to build, fit well and can be built with a minimum of hassle. They are one of the "go-to" options for any Japanese plane and for most that fought in the Pacific Theater. When it comes to older kits, I think Hasegawa is the best company arguably, but they are also still making newer ones.

Tamiya
Another Japanese company of course, Tamiya is the higher end Hasegawa, generally speaking more details, better quality and slightly higher accuracy, for roughly double or triple the price. They also seem to be moving more into 1/48 scale.

Special Hobby (I think also linked to MPM at some point and CMK who make aftermarket parts)
Czech. I think these guys were originally just doing a few short run kits and one-offs but more recently they seem to perhaps be expanding their efforts. If their "new tool" P-40N is any indication they are really stepping up their game. Older Special Hobby kits have a lot of resin parts, photo etch parts and vacuform canopies, the latter in particular i find hard to work with. But newer kits are more mainstream with the regular types of parts. I have made 5 Special Hobby kits and while the older ones were harder to make than the newer, all came out superb. They also do a lot of kits of very rare and unusual WW2 planes. These guys may be my favorite for that reason alone.

Eduard
These guys could be called the Czech Tamiya, only maybe more so. Fantastic quality kits though i find them a bit intimidating. I have opened the box of my Eduard "Weekend Edition" 1/72 Spit IX with the internal bulkheads etc., and ended up closing it again 3 times because I was not quite ready for that much work!

Italeri
If Hasegawa is the Japanese Airfix, Italeri is the Italian Airfix. To me they make nice kits that aren't too expensive and come together pretty well. Their older kits - like the older Airfix ones, are a bit more rough, but the newer ones, most recently for me their superb Cant Z.506 floatplane kit (which I bought but have only unboxed and not built yet) are quite nice. Because there are so many unique and interesting Italian aircraft from WW2 Italeri has become one of my favorites. Like with Airfix, they seem to have been releasing some new tools and the improvements from their older kits are night and day.

Second best for me were Sword, Revell (esp. Revell of Germany), Heller, Academy, Azur, Hobby Craft, Master Craft, RS Model). These were all pretty good, but maybe required a bit more effort to get them built. Main issues I had with most of these were either fit (Heller, Azur) or Decals (Academy) or overall shape (Academy).

The Bad ones
A Model, Testor, Matchbox, ICM, Hobby Boss, Frog, Lindburg, Roden. For me these all either didn't come out looking like the plane they were supposed to represent, or else were so hard to make properly that I was left with a somewhat sour feeling. I may change my mind on these, as some of the 'good' companies also had some bad older kits (some going back to the 60's so I guess it should be expected).

Of all these the most weird to me are the Hobby Boss and similar dumbed down kits which are seemingly growing in popularity which only have a handful of parts. This kind of defeats the purpose of even making a model and they also tend to be rather crude representations of the actual aircraft... but sadly, for some planes it's hard to find anything else (the only recent kit for the P-38 in 1/72 is from Hobby Boss).


Still Missing!

The planes I could not find modern kits for, or had a shockingly hard time locating in 1/72 were:

The P-38 Lightning - you can't seem to find any modern kit for these and most of what is on Ebay are mediocre kits from 20 years ago or more. This is odd to me because the P-38 is such a popular plane! From what I have read most of the kits you can find aren't that great. This is shocking to me! Maybe you can chalk this up to the last American model company (Revell) floundering for a long time and folding recently. I guess no other countries really made use of the P-38, but for all it's flaws it was a great fighter and it's a really neat design. There needs to be more of these available.

The SBD Dauntless - the plane the safeguarded America in Coral Sea and Midway is almost nowhere to be found. After 3 months I finally found and snatched up one of the rare Hasegawa kits, (an SBD-3) but there really should be more.

The D3A "Val". Though there are a lot of Japanese kits available, I had a hard time finding a D3A and the kit I did end up finding was quite old.

Later model P-40s. Special Hobby made some very good short run kits for the P-40F, and Sword made an excellent double kit of P-40Ks, but both are extremely rare. Considering that these were the most successful P-40 model for the Americans and their Allies (including both RAF and VVS specifically) you would think these would have more representation. Hopefully now that Special Hobby seems to be expanding and put out their new tool P-40N they will also go into these crucial mid-war types. Trumpeter is also releasing a P-40F in 1/32 scale, they have shown the box art, unclear when it's coming out precisely though.

Bf109F - the pilots favorite Messerschmitt, and yet hard to find. Zvezda makes a beautiful Bf 109F-2, but the F-4 is still quite elusive for me. Bf 109F-4 you can find one kit for this (Mistercraft) which is cheap but just for that reason I wonder about the quality (anybody know?).

The Russian fighters. I was able to find plenty of Yak-3s everywhere, because that is the one pretty much everyone said was great. But the Yak 1,7 and 9 were all great planes, as were the La 5 and 5FN. The Pe 2 was one of the wars greatest fast bombers. The LaGG 3 was more mediocre but like the Hurricane, it still accounted for many enemy aircraft. The I-16 is still fairly well represented now by Eduard etc. which is good because it's a neat little plane. You can find the Russian planes made by the lower end Russian companies, but these kits are a little rough. I'd like to have a few more kits that don't require the toughness to get through Winter in Murmansk to finish.

Anyway those are my thoughts so far. Will chime in a bit more if I remember anything else. Thanks again to the forum for all the help a while back.

S

 

[Schweik]

So it's been about a year, I thought I would update this.

My mission is to make models, in the "gentleman's scale" of 1/72 (for reasons of both space and budget) of most of the important fighters and light bombers of the middle years of WW2, say mid 1941 through mid 1943. I'm not a fantastic modeller, I don't even own an airbrush if that tells you anything, so I'm not creating works of art, I'm just trying to put together and paint reasonably accurate examples of the key aircraft that were duking it out during the tipping point of the war, so that I can look at them all in the same scale and get a better feel for it all.

When I started this project I noticed to my surprise, given how many models and model companies are around these days, that a lot of really key aircraft are very hard to find in 1/72, some in any scale at all. I've been learning and finding what I can, and I've made a few more kits since the last post.


So first, I made that IAR-80, and though my skills are very limited, I'm quite happy with it. (It's about a year old so it's very dusty in the pic but maybe one day I'll acquire a case to keep them in so that doesn't happen. )Sadly that company Sova-M (whoever that actually is) seems to make very few if any other WW2 planes. It was a good kit, fit together well, seems to be accurate, had nice decals and came out looking nice (again, given the inept construction and brush painting).

Next, one of the biggest holes in my list: the Russian fighters. Mid-war Soviet fighters are extremely hard to find good kits for. The only really ubiquitous one is the Yak-3, which seemingly every model company makes. The Yak-3 is a fantastic, elegant aircraft, but it went into action in 1944. I think we need some representation for the fighters that did the most to win the war against the Germans during the crucial years of Stalingrad and Kursk. Next most popular after the Yak-3 are La - 7 or La - 5FN, the latter being close enough to my period that I bought one. All the other Yak fighters the Yak 1 (8,700 produced), the Yak 7 (6,399 produced) and even the mighty Yak 9 (16,000 produced, through 1951) are very difficult to find a good kit for in the gentleman's scale, and are fairly rare even in 1/48 or 1/32. The very ubiquitous LaGG-3 is also rare (though I made one of the cheap Eastern European kits of it) but the MiG-3 for some reason seems popular and you can find them. Maybe because it looked cool even though it was crap. I'll probably get one eventually.

My focus though is on the key front-line designs that really helped turn the tide. I found two fairly rare kits for important mid-war Soviet fighters worthy of attempting to build, and made the mistake of trying to do them at the same time thinking they were both oldish kits and looked pretty simple. The first was an old Zvezda La-5FN kit and the second was a Brengun Yak-1 "1942 edition". The Zvezda went together easily but lacked a lot of details or parts, though the actual real WW2 fighter was fairly bare bones. For example the kit didn't have any cover below the back part of the canopy, it was just open down into the fuselage. I thought that was a mistake and cut out a piece of paper to put in there as a panel. After I had already glued the canopy in place I found photos of real La-5's where this was actually open. I guess that is one way to save weight!



All in all the Zvezda La 5FN was a good kit, because it fit together fairly well and looks reasonably accurate. But it's one you'd probably want to get some aftermarket parts for if you were trying to create a masterpiece. I'm pretty sure it's an old one because their more recent kits (like the Yak-3, Fw 190, Bf 109F-2, and Ju 88 that I have made) are all excellent and have far more detail.


The Brengun Yak-1 kit was different, I still enjoyed making it, but it went together at a much slower pace than the La 5 mainly because 1) it had a lot more parts (not a bad thing necessarily), 2) many of those parts were photo etch or resin (also not necessarily a bad thing but not my favorite) and 3) most of them didn't seem to fit together that well. I wasn't sure if the bad fit was due to my poor skillz or the actual kit itself, but it was a struggle for me I started them both simultaneously and tried to make them in parallel, the La 5 was already done when I was still struggling to fit the wings and fuselage together on the Yak. Eventually out of impatience I basically gave up on sanding and puttying and shimming with some of the more egregious seams remaining (as you can see in the photo). I also personally find photo-etch and resin to be a bit of a struggle, particularly resin for some reason... there was a moment where a resin wheel was superglued to my fingertip which I shudder to remember... that again is probably just due to my clumsiness.

So I'd say Brengun is worth buying if you want a Yak-1, it is an interesting challenge and will give you something that looks about right. It also includes a couple of different canopy variations which is nice. But I think a cleaner, easier kit would be good to have. So far I have not been able to find a Yak-1B (quite different and far more capable than the earlier Yak-1), a Yak-7B, or any of the several important variants of the Yak-9 in 1/72 except for the ICM, Roden, and / or Valom kits which I'm leery of. MPM, Revell Germany, Zvezda, Eduard, or Airfix, are you listening? (I know probably not). Anyway, it would be nice to have some better options. The Yak-9 is a hugely important aircraft in WW2 it's ridiculous that we don't have a nicer kit available.

But yeah I know, those are Soviet planes, Russians and even Central Asians flew them. Many people don't agree with me that they were great planes with great pilots. Ok. But how about this - who can find me a current, reasonably accurate mid-war P-38? or really any P-38, in the gentleman's scale?


I searched and searched for a 1/72 P-38, and I found two so far, neither really acceptable. One was an ancient, I think 1960's vintage Hasegawa, which has the benefit of being a very rare early model P-38 (even though it was with these that Bong and McGuire ran up their astonishing victory tallies). I have made the Hasegawa one, and tried to dress it up like a weather worn New Guinea veteran, the other one which I bought but haven't made yet is a Hobby Boss (Chinese) which is one of those weird kits with like 5 parts. Though this aged Hassegawa P-38F will do for the time being, like the first couple they sent to Port Moreseby, more and better options are badly needed! I'm not satisfied and am still searching.

Summary and whingeing
Overall, I feel like several key planes are either missing or poorly represented in this scale. I'm not satisfied with my Aichi D3A so I bought another Fujimi one which is hopefully a little nicer than the old one I made, I bought an Italeri Bf 109F-4 but it has poor reviews. Seeing as this was the German pilots favorite fighter, and the most important type during the most crucial years in Russia and the Middle East, there ought to be more and better kits. The Zvezda 109F-2 is great but the F-4 was more important. We'll see what I can do with the Italeri maybe it's good enough. The lack of P-38s is ridiculous. There should be a few mid-war types to represent the struggle in the Pacific and in the Med where this type was fighting very hard. And I still think we need a lot more Soviet fighters. We still need a ggood LaGG-3 kit (I'd say at least 2 or 3 variants) we need a good early Yak -1, a good Yak-1B, a good Yak -7, and at least two variants for the Yak-9, probably 3 or 4 would be ideal (early Yak-9, Yak-9T with the big 37mm gun (3,000 produced), Yak-9D or DD, and Yak-9U).

I'm making a few more bombers and have come to the conclusion that the Martin Baltimore was probably the RAF's single most important type in the Med, followed by the A-20. Fortunately though they had been rare for a long time, MPM has made a very nice looking early A-20 kit and also a later war one. I'm doing the early / Med kit soon and will post here when I do it, it looks great in the box. For the Baltimore only Azur and Frog seem to make them, I don't really know if either kit is very good but both are pretty expensive. I'm leery.





Aside from that, I found a Revell Germany Ventura, pretty rare bird - I was looking for a Hudson which I found but only after this one was made.


And Zvezda makes a very nice Ju 88, not a very rare kit and it shouldn't be, as it was a very important aircraft to the German War effort, particularly in the Med and Russian Front.


And Tamiya made this (to me) quite nice Il-2 kit though I didn't do a beautiful job of it. Fortunately the Il-2 doesn't seem to be rare in this scale.

 

[Schweik]

Forgot to mention, I did make my very old Airfix SBD.



Very simple kit, almost no cockpit or gunners position detail, raised panel lines, yellowed decals etc., but it came together Ok more or less basically OOTB with just a little bit of scratch building.

I still say we very badly need a more up to date kit. I notice Airfix has a new looking box of this out, but I don't know if it's a new tool. If is, halleluja! If not we are back to square one. I'm not really satisfied with the one I made but it's ok for now, still looking for something better.

 

[MIflyer]

I have a couple of the Airfix 1/48 BF-109F and one of the Heller 1/8 F with paints. Have not dug into them yet but they look pretty good.

One interesting thing about the AMT 1/48 BF-109G is that the cowl gun bulges are separate so you could leave them off to make an F. I think it is a reissued Otaki?

One little mentioned 109 is the BF-109T. MPM put one out in 1/48 and I have one

AMT came out with a range of 1/48 P-40 kits, including the F. Their N model is interesting in that it has to option of installing the original style rear canopy or the later version with all that clear area. So, with a little work you could build any of the snub nosed Allison P-40's, E through N. They are nice kits. However, stay away from the
Hobbycraft/IDEA P-40E which has some problems that will require some extra work.

I have some of the Accurate Miniatures Yak-1 (4) and Yak-1B (2) kits. They are quite nice.

Of course ICM made a nice Yak-7V and I have one of those.

 

[fubar57]

Academy make a 1:48 Bf 109T-2 which I have been looking at getting

 

[Schweik]

I have a couple of the Airfix 1/48 BF-109F and one of the Heller 1/8 F with paints. Have not dug into them yet but they look pretty good.

Let me know how they come out. I have a few 1/48 kits too for the more important types. Is the Airfix one a 'new tool'?

One interesting thing about the AMT 1/48 BF-109G is that the cowl gun bulges are separate so you could leave them off to make an F. I think it is a reissued Otaki?

Good to know!

One little mentioned 109 is the BF-109T. MPM put one out in 1/48 and I have one

Interesting though that is basically a one-off, did they even make one? I do have a few one-offs kit's I made though they are mostly 1930's and early war planes. I made an antique Airfix Westland Whirlwind kit that came out better than it had any right to do...

AMT came out with a range of 1/48 P-40 kits, including the F. Their N model is interesting in that it has to option of installing the original style rear canopy or the later version with all that clear area. So, with a little work you could build any of the snub nosed Allison P-40's, E through N. They are nice kits. However, stay away from the
Hobbycraft/IDEA P-40E which has some problems that will require some extra work.

I have the AMT P-40F in 1/48, haven't made it yet though it looks good, has markings for 79th or 33rd FG, or Free French. I have collected a few 1/48 kits for several different planes though I have postponed trying to make any of them until my skill and kit improves sufficiently (may even eventually get an airbush..)

Academy has a 1/72 P-40M/N (the kit has two cockpit options which are supposed to make the difference) but if you look at it next to the Special Hobby planes, or even the Hasegawa, and compare all three to photos of a real one, you can see how off it is, the angles are all wrong etc. I made one and can post some photos for comparison.

The new tool Airfix Tomahawks are quite good, both in 1/72 and 1/48. I'm waiting for them to release a Kittyhawk II or III (though the Sword P-40K double-kit is very good)

I have another Special Hobby P-40F double kit which I haven't made yet but it looks very good in the box and unlike their last one I made, canopy is not the dreaded vacuform.

Trumpeter released a 1/32 P-40F recently which I also have, but the engine cowling is strange and the decals are downright bizarre, I have a feeling a lot of other things are probably off. I'll do my best with it though.

I bought a Heller P-40E which looks simple but I'd like to see if the shape is good, it's cheap enough.

I have some of the Accurate Miniatures Yak-1 (4) and Yak-1B (2) kits. They are quite nice.

Of course ICM made a nice Yak-7V and I have one of those.

That is good to know. Accurate Miniatures seems to be rare and expensive but given the paucity of other good kits for these I'll go looking for those. The ICM Yak-7 is nice? I think that is the one I made... I thought it was a little rough...

 

[MIflyer]

They did an actual very limited production run of the BF-109T and since the carrier was never available they served defending a port in, I think, Norway.

The AMT P-40F looks good in the box but supposedly the cowling is wrong and I think it was Mauve that reissued with a revised cowling. The pictures I saw of it looked rather ugly. The P-40F cowl is rather different from the Allison cowl, not simply lacking the top carb airscoop, but I don't think it looks that much different.

20 years or so ago Model Expo was selling Accurate Miniatures kits very cheap and I picked up a number of them. I got a case of twelve 1/48 P-51A's for something like $5.50 each, including shipping.

 

[Schweik]

Yeah I think the nose on that AMT is a little too steeply curved or something, similar to the Trumpeter, it's also a "short tail" variant whereas most of the L/F were long tail (they were more stable).

Apparently they released a resin nose to fix the nose problem, as you can see here

I'll keep my eyes peeled for some Accurate Miniatures kits but they rarely seem to be available any more, you got lucky!

 

[Schweik]

There is a new Zvezda Pe-2 in 1/72

 

[fubar57]

If its anything like the Zveda 1/48 version, the reviews are very positive

 

[MIflyer]

There is some controversy about the long tail P-40's. The original designer, Berliner, said that the P-40 stability problem was due to the nose air intake being too large, causing hot air to spill out of the front and disrupt the airflow down the fuselage. Look at the P-40B intake in comparison to the later ones with the F series engines. But Curtiss decided to fix the problem by stretching the tail to give the fin and rudder more leverage and he left the company. As it was, the original XP-40 had a belly mounted radiator like the Hurricane but Curtiss management wanted the radiator under the nose, supposedly for cosmetic reasons. I guess the designer got tired of being ignored.

The later P-40's were known to be a bear to fly because the additional leverage of the fin and rudder, with the fin offset for P-factor, meant that rudder trim changes were huge in dives versus full power level flight or climbs.

 

[Schweik]

Interesting points. I don't think they were really a bear to fly but they did require frequent trim changes with high speed changes. I've spoken to three P-40 pilots at airshows and a Tuskegee veteran who flew them, they all told me that it was one of the easiest Warbirds to fly. Jeff Ethell also said the same thing in his famous video, specifically contradicting his own earlier descriptions of the plane (before he had flown it himself). He said it was "much more maneuverable than a Mustang" and "like a Pitt's with an Allison" (9:20 in the youtube video) and notes that a Mustang is "locked in cement" by comparison, he says it is "a very docile airplane" (10:15) though he does also mention there is "a lot going on at takeoff". One of the young airshow guys I spoke to in 2017 also mentioned getting 300 mph + at 25 inches boost in his P-40N which is very low compared to wartime power settings, but the modern arishow aircraft is definitely lighter with no guns and probably no self-sealing tanks. It did still have armor though.

Ethell was flying a P-40E though, he doesn't dive the plane in the video and the highest boost setting he mentions was 35" Hg so he may not have experienced the worst effects with a much more powerful 1,400 - 1,500 hp engine (ala P-40F/L or K) or diving at over 450 mph.

It is definitely true that it took frequent trim changes and some heavy rudder to help control the plane especially when diving and recovering from dives. It seemed to be a difficult aircraft to transition to coming from lower performance trainers, and even transitioning from Hurricanes. It was fast, had a lot of torque at takeoff and a fairly high landing speed compared to say a Stearman or a T-6. But it had benign stall characteristics and experienced pilots could apparently handle it. The long tail did seem to work pretty well to help with the longitudinal stability issues. Canadian Ace James "Stocky" Edwards discussed this issue a lot in his memoirs and interviews and was so focused on it (literally) he had a turn coordinator instrument placed in the top of his control panel, just under the gunsight. He was one of several pilots who noted that the long tail largely fixed the stability problem, both on the Kittyhawk II (P-40 F/L) and the Kittyhawk III (K and M).

49th FG Ace Robert DeHaven said the same thing about the K and N. The early K was fitted with a big dorsal fin to help control the torque from the much greater horsepower, particularly for the problem of takeoff swing. But it didn't seem to do much. Later they lengthened it like on the late model F, P-40L, M and N models and several pilots commented on the improvement. (This is interesting for models because all the P-40K models I know of have the fin. Apparently about half of them were made with the long tail but I don't know how you could distinguish a late model P-40K from a (much less peppy) P-40M. I think for the N you can see some differences in the canopy. The only P-40M model I know of is the Academy one and it's pretty off, I wouldn't recommend it.


As a rule it seems to me that the longer tailed aircraft were often more stable, quite a few planes were lengthened over the course of the war as engines got more powerful. The Spitfire was gradually lengthened, later Mark Spitfires were 2' longer than the original ones, (Spit Mk 1 was 29' 11" long, the Spit XIV was 32' 8", the F. Mk 24 was 32' 11") The Fw 190D was 5 ft longer than the A-8 (34' 5" vs 29' 5" per Wikipedia)


As far as models go, though Special Hobby is making a very good short run P-40F/L now (look for the double kit if you prefer injected molded cockpits), and Sword makes a good P-40K (their best one also seems to be the double kit), I'd like to see more of these made because the P-40F/L was definitely the most important US fighter in the Med from the time of Torch through Anzio, and the P-40K was one of the most important for the US and Australians in the Pacific in the crucial years of 1942-1943, for the US in the CBI, and for the Soviets all in the same critical period. Most American and Soviet P-40 Aces in particular racked up some or all of their victories in one of those two types.

 

[Schweik]

It's funny how many Tomahawk / P-40B /C models are made by so many companies because they were barely used by the US. The AVG got 100 of them and they managed to get 2 or 3 in the air at Pearl Harbor, but the vast majority (~800 IIRC) were fighting for the RAF or the Soviets (~200). All the other US Hawk-81s were used basically for training or coastal defense of the US or places like Panama.

The P-40E was more important, for the AVG, in the debacles at Java, and in the Philippines, as an export plane for the British and Soviets, and perhaps most crucially for the Australians and US 49th FG at Darwin and Milne Bay, but the K came along to replace it in 1942 and was the one that really pulled ahead of the Japanese opposition at the most important point in the war. The F and L did almost all of the fighting with the USAAF in the MTO (along with a few K's)

 

[Schweik]

Apparently Special Hobby makes a long fuselage P-40K / Kittyhawk III

 

[ktank]

So it's been about a year, I thought I would update this.

But yeah I know, those are Soviet planes, Russians and even Central Asians flew them. Many people don't agree with me that they were great planes with great pilots. Ok. But how about this - who can find me a current, reasonably accurate mid-war P-38? or really any P-38, in the gentleman's scale?

View attachment 552231
I searched and searched for a 1/72 P-38, and I found two so far, neither really acceptable. One was an ancient, I think 1960's vintage Hasegawa, which has the benefit of being a very rare early model P-38 (even though it was with these that Bong and McGuire ran up their astonishing victory tallies). I have made the Hasegawa one, and tried to dress it up like a weather worn New Guinea veteran, the other one which I bought but haven't made yet is a Hobby Boss (Chinese) which is one of those weird kits with like 5 parts. Though this aged Hassegawa P-38F will do for the time being, like the first couple they sent to Port Moreseby, more and better options are badly needed! I'm not satisfied and am still searching."

Did you have a look at the RS Models P38 range?

 

[ktank]

L

Academy has a 1/72 P-40M/N (the kit has two cockpit options which are supposed to make the difference) but if you look at it next to the Special Hobby planes, or even the Hasegawa, and compare all three to photos of a real one, you can see how off it is, the angles are all wrong etc. I made one and can post some photos for comparison.

Seems to me the major problem with the Academy P40s is the canopy, which is way too tall. Replace them with a Falcon/Squadron vacform canopy and it improves the appearance markedly. The other major problem is the shape of the spinner, but this can be fixed by sanding.