Well, I wrapped main assembly last night.
All I can say is...ugh.
It's been weird building this alongside Tamiya's P-47. With that one I'm near-constant awe of the engineering choices, of the way that everything fits together and fits well.
The P-38 has been the opposite. There's nothing that makes it unbuildable, but I think maybe in direct contrast to one of the slickest kits I've ever built, a lot of sloppy decisions become really apparent.
I actually didn't really have many problems with wing/boom alignment. I think getting the front of the booms and the rear stabilizer secured first helped a lot. But joining the booms to the wing things started to get weird. You could either have a decent fit up top and massive gaps underneath, or overall chaos. But I'm willing to give on that. It's a tough join with four different curves to deal with.
The most disappointing aspects were the lower nacelles and pretty much everything forward of the cockpit. Poor fit compounded by an absolute lack of not only locator pins, but anything to aid in positive location. If I were assembling it again, I'd seriously consider using sheet styrene to add an inner "lip" to help locate things.
In the end I managed to get everything more or less in place, and from three feet it totally looks like a Lightning, but given the amount of putty I'm going to need on the boom/wing joins, nacelles, and gun doors, I probably could have skipped weighting the booms...
On the Bench: 1/32 Trumpeter P-47 | 1/32 Hasegawa Bf 109G | 1/144 Eduard MiG-21MF x2
On Deck: 1/350 HMS Dreadnought
Blog/Completed Builds: doogsmodels.com