1/32 Hasegawa P-47D Thunderbolt

by Luc Janssen on April 24 2009

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Building

As this is again a splendid kit from Hasegawa, building was straightforward with no problems. I wanted to build a diorama of a P-47D having its guns removed from the port wing, so I scratch built the ammo-bay and left it empty.  The guns are from AIRES, the ammo-cases, barrels and crates came from the spare parts box.  The other elements (ladder, blast tubes, ammo-guiding trays) were scratch built as well.

I added the brake lines to the landing gear (Luc Van den Ende made me the oleos again!) and gave the tires another pattern.  In the cockpit I added some detail and I rebuilt the seat and its frame and I added the pilot’s straps.  The engine received some further detailing as well.

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Painting  

Painting was based on a well known photo of a P-47D, based at Duxford, To give the effect of a well-worn aircraft, firstly I sprayed an overall coat of aluminium, where after I gave 2 coats of satin varnish.  Once the last layer fully dry, I sprayed RAF Dark Green on the upper surfaces and RAF Sky “Type S” on the undersides. After the complete painting (invasion stripes, rudder colouring, ETO-bands, white nose, markings, symbols), the carefully stripping away of small parts of paint to create the effect of paint-wear was worked out.

Once this painstaking job finished, I gave some different tones in the colours, using pastels.  I prefer this method to pre-shading, as I always can correct it when it is overdone. Alter good cleaning, I sprayed an overall coat of gloss varnish and applied the decals, which were the insignias, the serial numbers and the checkers on the nose.

I used Model Master paints and varnishes.

Weathering

As a lot of weathering was already done, I only had to add a little contrast to some panel lines and a bit of supplementary shading to places that suffer most from the crew servicing the aircraft. The aluminium parts (landing gear, prop hub) were given a darker pastel touch as well.  

References

  • P-47D Thunderbolt in detail&scale
  • P-47D Thunderbolt in action
  • Walk Around P-47D
  • Republic P-47 Thunderbolt (MBI)
  • Squadron/signal Thunderbolt in the ETO
  • Yellow Series Republic P-47 Thunderbolt
  • P-47 Thunderbolt en action
  • Mechanism of Military Aircraft P-47 + P-51

Luc Janssen

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Photos and text © by  Luc Janssen