Gamera
Then I won this 1/32nd P-38 for the mega raffle... Not a bad day, not a bad day at all!!!
Hi there. Just a heads up on this Trumpeter kit if you're interested. I built it last year. It turned into a decent build at the end but it was also a bit of a prickly bear to deal with. My issues with it were....
1) flimsy landing gear - if you can invest in some aftermarket metal gear because the kit plastic is too weak and can/will break at the worst possible moments; also, build the wheel bays in full including inserting the gear legs in place (even if you have to do a lot of masking for painting) because getting the legs in afterwards is quite difficult and subjects them to too much stress that can cause breaking - I deviated from the instructions in order to paint the legs separately and paid the price for it later
2) the engines are quite decent in terms of detail & ease of build but they will put a lot of pressure on the seams as it's a very tight fit inside the nacelles - you could have some issues with the seams splitting enough later on to reveal themselves quite glaringly under a natural metal paint job
3) the decals are not fun to work with - they're too thin IMO and have a tendency to come apart or fold over on themselves; I'd invest in some slightly thicker AM decals instead
4) very spare details in the gear wells and cockpit - fun if you're good at doing a wiring and hydraulic line scratchbuild but if you don't it will look as barren as a desert
5) it's a notorious tail-sitter and will need lots (and lots and lots and lots.....) of weight added to the nose-cone and forward area of the engine nacelles - I'd recommend using something like small metal BB's or fishing sinkers in order to get as much weight as you possibly into the nooks and crannies
6) there's not enough room in the nose-cone for both the armament and the needed weights so you'll probably have to sacrifice one for the other if you opt to have the gun bay opened up for viewing the details
7) the clear plastic lamp bulbs for the lights at the wingtips and on the two vertical stabilizers are too big for the holes provided for them; they're also very difficult to handle once off the sprue tree if you try to sand them down enough to fit; I gave up altogether on using them and opted instead to just fill the holes with thick CA glue that luckily dried smooth enough into a decent enough bulb shape
8) the decals only have options for Pacific Theatre birds - I painted mine for the European campaign because I always wanted to try the natural metal/black & white identification stripes paint scheme; it looks fine to me IMO but using the decals this way is not historically accurate in the slightest and essentially entirely fictional
9) the horizontal wing-half seams in between the cockpit & engine inboard side keep splitting enough on mine to persistently reveal themselves, and this is after multiple gluings and sandings; I highly recommend in this particular area using a strong and very thick glue, followed by a strong and very thick putty, to prevent this from happening - maybe even use something really thick like the old style Testors tube glue or a two-part epoxy glue to provide maximum strength from the outset so you don't have to fiddle with it later the way I had to
10) if you opt for having the gun-bay covers closed you might have to put some support tabs in so the covers have something strong to rest up against; the covers are very thin and have a tendency to get pushed inwards if you forget how flimsy they are and mistakenly pick up the model by the nose; this was probably the most annoying part of my build as I had to re-glue and re-putty the covers several times
.........
Don't get me wrong at all. It's a fine intermediate-level kit that gives you a great result at the end. But it has some moderately serious issues too. Trumpeter seemed fairly confused on what they were trying to accomplish with this kit. It's great to have a P-38 in big scale. But at the same time why have such finely detailed engines that are going to be almost fully covered up by the nacelles, yet in the very same kit have such boring & empty detail for the areas that will be seen immediately, like the cockpit and gear wells? I've found this to be typical of Trumpeter large-scale kits where something has been over-emphasized by their designers while other equally important areas of the kit seem to have been completely ignore. This particular P-38 is not a model for a decently skilled builder to be worried about but it does have some things that will cause some difficulties during the build due to Trumpeter's design approach.
Have as much fun with it as you can though. There are tons of very good aftermarket items out there for this kit that if I would have bought before construction if I'd known about the poorer aspects of building this one OOB. I'm happy with the way my one turned out but I certainly could have done without the multiple frustrations.
Cheers regardless! 