I was going to wait for a group build to tackle this one, but after visiting Alaska and seeing an Aleutian Tiger under restoration, I wanted to move this up.
So I have the Hasegawa kit, which came (eBay) with the Eduard PE set, and I have the Barracuda decals for the aircraft in the foreground of this image.
As many/most of you will know, Hasegawa molded the P-40 with multiple inserts for the fuselage and wings so they could use the basic model for multiple variants. And that means lots of seam work just to get to a basic fuselage half, which is a big downside to the kit, in my opinion, and that makes me happy Airfix is releasing a B model later this year, instead of Hasegawa revisiting this one.
I decided to install the inserts before joining the fuselage instead of following the instructions, which show them being istalled after, mainly to avoid a step at any join (I'd rather fill a seam up top or down below than reshape the fuselage itself.
Here you can see the tail sections are added, as are the sections for the area behind the cockpit.
Still cleanup work to do on the panel lines, but Mr. Dissolved Putty is my friend here.
In the meantime, I got to work on the intake, and I decided not to go with actual mesh screens just because it's so buried and most people won't see it.
And then I worked on the wing gun inserts. One of them didn't fit very well at all, and too a fair amount of cleanup. I sanses, used Mr. Dissolved Putty, and then primed and sanded again to get to this place. You can see the seam, but it's very smooth, and I think that when I throw another coat of primer on it today, it will have disappeared (though I need to rescribe that panel line that somehow got crooked on me).
I think the guns ended up being ok, but if I accidentally misshaped them by hitting them with sandpaper, I will most likely replace them with some Albion Alloys brass tubing.
I also joined the fuselage halves last night, and did some seam cleanup. Hasegawa did modelers a favor by designing the cockpit so it can be dropped in from the bottom with the fuselage halves already closed.
This is the first step on my cockpit. I plan on making it somewhat dirty because of the volcanic sand they had in the Aleutians.
Anyway, that's all for now. I am hoping to get major assembly done by this weekend so I can start throwing primer on it.
-BD-