The aircraft: the
P.40E belongs to the American first generation's monoplane. She was quite a good
aeroplane, with sturdiness as her main characteristic. She was fast enough to
compete against some of her principal opponents but her main default was due the engine,
the Allison V 1710 which was unsuitable for high level works. She was however
very useful in the Middle and Far East fronts.
Click on
images below to see larger images
THE MODEL: this is the old and aged Airfix series 1 kit; it is far from the perfection but it is not worth to trash away. I built it the last summer and I'
assembled it OOB. It has only some scratch built interior plus the figure pilot. The kit was presented to me by a friend that didn't want it anymore but it lacked decals. Luckily
I just had an old Hasegawa decal sheet for the P.40 that resembled the original very much.
The colours were
those classic desert camo finish ones, Dark Earth, Middle Stone & Azure
Blue, being these - in the Humbrol range - respectively H.29, H.63 (8^ Army
Desert Yellow) and H. 144. Hasegawa's decals are better than the originals and
with a drop of Tamiya Mark-Sotfer they adere very well. With a minimun of
effort and a light shade of weathering I obtained a reasonable replica of the
mythic 112° Sqn. RAF Shark-mouthed P.40. Good work to everyone!
Paolo De Sanctis
|