Hello, fellow modelers and readers!
This time I'd like to share with you two recently finished
kits of two US aircraft that served in the WWII, perhaps the only two originally
designed as fighters that carried official designations in strict sequence, the
Bell P-39 Airacobra and the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk. I decided to show these
together because they shared the same basic camouflage colors, Dark Olive Drab
41 over Neutral Gray 43, so I finished both simultaneously.
Speaking on the kits, the Heller P-39Q kit is an old tooled
one with raised panel lines, little detail in the cockpit and the wheel wells,
and with a very good fit for a kit of its age. I purchased it more than 30 years
ago. The Academy P-40E Warhawk kit was purchased shortly after its introduction
in the market. It has beautiful recessed panel lines, well detailed cockpit and
wheel wells, and a very good fit.
I started the P-40E kit long before the P-39Q kit, because I
planned to replace the P-39 with a newer kit. The P-40E kit came with optional
decals for three versions, one Australian and two from the U.S. My initial plan
was to build the Australian option, a P-40E flown by Squadron Leader Dick
Cresswell from the 77 Sqn. of the RAAF. I researched the Internet and found
information on the accurate camouflage colors and markings of this particular
aircraft, and I found that the kit's decal sheet missed a decal for the flag
that go over the starboard side of the nose, and also decals for the serial
A29-113. Although I believe that I would have painted the flag, I thought (and
still think) that I'm unable to reproduce the small sized serial on both sides.
Then I considered finishing the plane as "Texas Longhorn," another
popular P-40 subject, but after some Internet research I found that the real
aircraft carried this decoration on both sides, but the decal sheet included
just one "Texas Longhorn" decal. At this point only one decal option
from the kit remained, for an "Aleutian Tiger" of the 11th Fighter Sqn.,
fortunately the decal sheet was complete for this version, although it still had
a mistake: the direction of the white band located ahead of the fuselage
insignias, as I could check with a black and white wartime photograph of the
real aircraft.
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The building process of my P-40 was almost straightforward, and
I almost didn't use any filler for this model. I just added two little pieces of
thin guitar steel chord wire to represent the gunsight that go a little ahead of
the windshield, and drilled thin holes over the spine, the leading edge of the
rudder and near the wingtips to attach antenna "wires" made from human
hair. I also added seat belts made from thin strips of masking tape in both the
P-39 and the P-40 models.
As the decal for the fuselage white band had the wrong
direction, I decided to paint both the fuselage and rudder white bands to avoid
a difference in color between the painted white and the white of the decal for
the rudder white band. The first step in the painting process was priming the
places where the bands are to be located, together with the wheel and propeller
hubs, which are going to be painted yellow. Later I painted the white bands and
the yellow parts. Then I masked the white bands before painting any other color,
it wasn't an easy task because the masks should have a 2.5 mm constant width,
and because of the angle of the fuselage band. When the masking was complete I
used a 8:3 mix of Humbrol 156 and 166 grays to paint Neutral Gray 43 on the
underside of the plane, and then masked it to began painting the upper surfaces.
Although I've seen on the Internet kits of the Aleutian Tiger
finished with many different degrees of weathering, I decided to apply my
weathering on the light side, following the argument of modeler Tom Cleaver from
Modeling Madness, who states that there's almost no sun to fade anything on the
Aleutian Islands.
For painting Dark Olive Drab 41 the IMPS Stockholm page
recommends Humbrol 66, a color that fortunately I already had, although I bought
it perhaps 40 years ago. The first coat went without trouble, but when I tried
to paint the control surfaces with a lighter shade I found that the paint was
damaged (the pigment separated from the solvent,) and I was unable to buy a
replacement (persons who live in Venezuela cannot purchase anything from abroad
on the Internet since 2014.) I then had to find a replacement among my paints.
Fortunately I found that one of the equivalence tables included in the
"Modeler's Technical Guide" book, from Model Master, states that
Humbrol 66 is equivalent to FS34031 US Army Helo Drab, a color that I also had.
To check it, I compared the color of my P-40 with the color of the AH-64D Apache
helicopter I built earlier, but I found that Hu 66 is a little greener than Helo
Drab, so I had to try a mix. After several trials I chose a 8:1 mix of Helo Drab
and FS34151 Interior Green for the base OD 41 color.
After painting the OD 41 base coat, I masked around the top of
the control surfaces and airbrushed a 8:1:1 mix of the abovementioned colors and
white to get a slightly lighter shade. When the painting was done, I highlighted
the panel lines with an F drawing pencil, and later I airbrushed gloss varnish
over all the model in order to prepare the model for decal application.
The decals were another source of problems, specially the tiger
faces that go around the nose, surrounding the exhaust stubs. Decals were thick
and didn't conform to curved surfaces, and their adherence was not so good. Even
on flatter surfaces I had to cut over the decals with a sharp No. 11 knife to
reveal the panel lines underneath. In the case of the tiger faces, I had to make
several cuts with the knife, and although I applied generous amounts of two
different decal solvents and finally a bit of Elmer's white school glue diluted
with water, the decals remained somewhat lifted from the surface at several
places. After many trials I decided to stop the decaling process as it was, then
I removed excess decal glue with a moist cotton bud and applied the final flat
varnish coat. The model was further weathered by applying pastel chalk smoke
stains and some paint chipping. The final step included adding the undercarriage
and the antenna wires, and painting the navigation lights.
By the time I started building the P-39, I had already finished
the PBY-5 Catalina that was published here on ARC the past year, and I had the
idea of modeling at least one aircraft wearing each one of the different
insignias that the US aircraft carried over the WWII (five in total.) In the
context of this project, the Catalina had the first kind of insignia (a white
star over a dark blue circle, with a red dot in the center,) the P-40 has two
variations of the second kind (the first kind without the red dot, and the
fuselage insignias also without the blue circle,) the P-39 the third kind, which
lasted just one and a half months in 1942 (the second kind with two white
rectangles added at both left and right sides of the roundel, and a red edge
surrounding all), a Dauntless that is now being built the fourth kind (the third
kind with the red edge removed,) and many others (including the Avenger and the
B-29 published some years ago here in ARC) with the fifth and definitive kind
(the third kind with blue replacing the red edge.)
For building my P-39, which had an US and a french option on the
decal sheet, I therefore chose the US version from the beginning. From
information gathered on the Internet I found that the P-39 is different from
many US WWII aircraft concerning the painting of the cockpit, the wheel wells
and the undercarriage legs: it didn't use Interior Green anywhere. The cockpit
and the undercarriage legs were painted with a 4:1 mix of Hu 75 Bronze Green and
Hu 27 Sea Grey, the wheel wells with Hu 81 Pale Yellow, which is equivalent to
Yellow Zinc Chromate primer. The battery that's visible on the rear part of the
cockpit was painted with Interior Black and drybrushed with flat aluminum paint.
I had to scratchbuild my battery because I lost the kit's one.
According to the kit's painting instructions the specific P-39 I
was building was based in California, so I decided to weather it more than my
P-40, knowing that it operated from a sunnier place than the Aleutian Islands. I
began the painting process by priming and painting the white of the tail, the
maing wingtips and the nose aft the propeller hub. Then I masked the white and
painted the underside of the aircraft with the same Neutral Gray 43 mix I used
previously on my P-40. I used lighter shades of OD 41 on my P-39, mixing the
same three colors that I used previously on my P-40: a 16:2:3 mix for the base
coat, and a 8:1:2 mix for weathering. In order to spend the minimum amount of
paint and solvent, I weathered my P-39 by dry brushing, and I will do the same
on future kits.
The step of decal application was similar to the one described
for the P-40, but the P-39 decals, although being older, behave a lot better.
The raised panel lines of the P-39 were highlighted also with a drawing F
pencil, this time used in a different way. I paid special attention to the smoke
stains of the P-39. I found a wartime color photograph of a pair of P-39 flying,
and I tried to replicate the smoke stains pattern shown in the photograph by
first airbrushing light gray mixed a bit with tan paint, and then by applying
some powdered pastel chalks. Notice that the smoke stains in this case partially
cover the front part of the insignia on each fuselage side. I had to paint the
exhaust stubs after the smoke stains. The final step in the building of this kit
was similar to that of the P-40.
Well, despite all the troubles I had with the Dark Olive Drab
finish, with the P-40 decals, and despite the fact that I didn't match the
yellow I painted with the one of the P-40 decals, in overall I enjoyed the
building of these two kits and I'm satisfied with the final outcome.
Thanks for watching and reading. I dedicate these models to my
31 year-old son David, who have enjoyed seeing photographs or illustrations of
aircraft decorated with teeth since he was a little kid.
Greetings from Caracas, Venezuela, a country where, even having 912 Km of
coasts and mighty rivers like the Orinoco (the one that inspired Jules Verne's
novel The superb Orinoco,) and having the tallest waterfall in earth,
thanks to our inept government only 1/6 of the homes of the country receive
water on a permanent basis, according to recent statistics. For an example, my
home receives just 15 min, in average, of water every day, with a strong
tendency to decrease (the day I finished writing this text my home didn't
receive any water.)
Orlando Sucre Rosales
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