P-38L-5-LO from Trumpeter kit in 1/32

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Great stuff Alberto. I've only just noticed your request for colour info on the HVARs - yes, they were Olive Green, and British RPs were Dark Green, with Olive heads. Both the USN and the RN used the light grey on the rocket bodies, and this was also used by most services post WW2, although Green could also be seen in some cases.
The main reason for green was as camouflage, for outdoor storage, so that they would not be as noticeable, from the air, as large piles of light grey things!
Of course, this was not needed aboard ship, so the basic primer coat, light grey, was retained.
 
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Many thanks for all nice comments!!!
Since my last pictures I spent several hours trying to overcame an issue, may be a little one but I felt it was important for a good final result: I'm talking about torque links on main undercarriage: I got three series of them:
1) Those coming with the kit: nothing to share with the real stuff.
2) Those supplied together with the white metal landing legs made by Scale Aircraft Conversions: simply unacceptable to my taste
3) Those supplied with the Eduard p.e. set: nice but too large to fit on above legs
So my decision was to scratch-build new ones with plasti-card: I think I obtained a reasonably good result and I hope to be able to post pictures of them tomorrow.
Alberto
 
Sounds good Alberto. I was going to get the rather expensive white metal set for my Fennec conversion - until I noticed they were a direct, metal copy of the kit parts, still with the nose wheel yoke on the wrong side of the leg!
 
I managed to take some pictures this evening but first of all a couple of pictures of the real torque-link.



and then my pictures of the three option plus mine



and the scratch-built assembled on the SAC legs



I think that SAC legs are a good option because they are well done and stronger then kit's ones.

About front gear I used the p.e. one supplied by Eduard and it looks OK


Alberto
 
Yes, I love my two cats if not today I would probably kill one of them, this:


Today I was masking the upper surface of wings to do some little paint retouches when she, the one in the picture, jumped from an elevated position straight to my desk or, better, straight on my model as it's almost large as my desk x

Result:

- Front undercarriage leg: broken
- Both main undercarriage legs: bent, they are in white metal
- wind-shield squeezed on the cockpit hit the gun-sight that went loose but also left two heavy marks on the wind-shied itself.

In about a full afternoon I repaired everything except the fork supporting the front leg that can be seen here



I will have to re-built it from scratch while the wind-shield is under "Future" treatment.

So no picture yet of my progress, I'm going in the wrong direction ...
Alberto
 
I must admit that I was at least partially lucky, because the paper and tape that covered most of the upper surfaces protected the model from major damage, just a small scratch on the right engine nacelle paint, easy to recover.

Additionally I must say that I'm quite disappointed with SAC landing gear: the white metal they used is too soft: I had already to replace the front leg because bent under the weight of the ballast in the nose. What I did, I used the plastic part from the kit but replacing the exposed part of the rod (too short) with a 4 mm long alu tube.
The one shown in the photo above is the SAC one.
Alberto
 

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