Building a P-38 the Hard Way! By Neil Crawford

Background

I've always liked the P38, and after an overdose of reading about the air war in the Pacific, I realised that I had to build a P38, and it had to be from the Pacific area. Also aluminium finish and green spinners was a must. This singled the choice down to the 80th FS, and after some dithering between Dick Bong's "Downbeat" and Cy Homer's "Uncle Cy's Angel" I decided that Uncle Cy was the man, mostly I think because he looks so cool in some of the photos. He walked with a limp after a pre-war motorbike accident, and was a superb pilot. His final tally of kills is 15, even though 16 are displayed on his last P38, I don't think the pilots were anywhere near as bothered by discrepancies as the historians are! He had several P38's and I decided to build his last one a P38L, this one is fairly well documented, even so there is always a compromise between perfect research and actually taking knife to plastic, at some stage one has to give up and just get on with it. Another reason I chose Cy Homer's last P38 was that by late 1944, he was a Captain and I guess there were enough mechanics on hand to keep his (brand new) plane well polished, as I wanted to build a fairly shiny P38. I had read a good article in Scale Models about P38'ing in 1/72 scale, so I knew that the Hasegawa kit was the one to get, I already had a Revell kit which is the second best kit. I decided that a combination of the two kits would be a good idea. Since I built this, the Accademy kit has arrived, I haven't had a good look at it yet, but from the photos I've seen on the net it looks a little clunky to me. I think making the ultimate P38 is going to be hard work whichever kit you start with.

Cockpit Interior

Cockpit interior is mostly just a concoction of photo-etched parts from various sets, the big difficulty in using P/E parts is getting them to fit, they are nearly always too big. I used some of the Revell parts and some Hasegawa depending on which was best, the radio boxes behind the pilot are from Revell, they are much nicer than Hasegawas empty hole. The roll-over structure just beneath the canopy is typical of the P38, I made mine from piano wire.

I had the Hi-Tech and the Eduard photo-etched sets, and to be honest there is an awful amount of junk on them, on the Hi-tech set particuarly I find I have used very little of it, there are flaps, but P38s rarely have them down so what's the point? The same thing with the radiator flaps, I did take the trouble of cutting them away, but I made my own flaps instead of the P/E parts because they are nearly always shut, so the nice interior detail is pointless, and making them from plastic is easier than trying to make P/E parts fit. I found that all the various small intakes are better shaped on the kit than the photo-etched ones. The wheel well interiors on the Eduard set are nice, (and fit for a change) but they are only for the main wheels , which leaves you with an unevenly detailed underside, no big deal, but sort of silly. The only really useful bits in the Hi-tech set are the resin wheels and Hasegawa kit wheels are nearly as good. The Eduard set is a little better, but really only the interior parts are useful. I saw the Aires resin kit at the Swedish Nationals, and that looked much better than both of them.

Nose Job

The problem with Hasegawa's P38 is the nose profile from dead ahead is wrong, it's sort of flat on top. The other thing that I discovered during correction of that is that the whole wing leading edge is too thin, which means the Hasegawa nose is also too shallow. I compared a lot to photos and various drawings, and decided that the Revell nose has a pretty good shape, so I decided to use that, but with the Hasgawa nose-cone, and also the Hasegawa nose wheel bay area. The nose cone because the gun holes are smaller, and the lower part because there were nice footsteps on it. I started by thickening the wing leading edge with a 2.5mm wedge, tapering off slightly outwards, then a 1mm wedge outside the nacelles, this outer wedge tapered to nothing. I used the lower wing centre section from the Revell kit, that glues on the the inside of the nacelles, lower down than the Hasegawa parts would have been. So now I had a thicker wing. I also added the same 2.5mm wedge in the front fuselage sides below the windscreen. Next I cut off the Hasgawa nose just ahead of the windscreen, then it was really just a matter of glueing all the bits of the Revell and Hasegawa noses together in the right places. When everything is glued together it's important to get the nose straight. I used a pair of dividers to make sure the distance was identical from each propeller shaft to the nose tip. After all was set milliput, CA, and every other kind of putty was applied liberally, and sanded down. One of the advantages of foil-covering is that you don't need to worry about panel lines, just be sure it's smooth, the panel-lines come automatically during foiling.

Tail Booms

The tail booms are too skinny, a fault common to many P38 kits, as the Revell booms were no better I decided to do a rough and ready fix. I glued on strips of plasticard, so that width and height
were correct compared to drawings. Then covered the lot with milliput, I then sanded down the milliput till the white plasticard began to show through evenly. This method won't work well if one plans on scribing panel lines, because of the different material hardness. But again when foiling it doesn't matter, only shape is important.

Foiling

My approach to this is kitchen-foil glued on with microscale metal foil adhesive. I use thick foil, the kind for use in ovens, the reason is that it stands up to sanding better, and brush marks from the glue show through less. I paint the adhesive on the shiny side of the foil with a wide brush, the adhesive is thinned with water. I usually do an A4 page size sheet, which I keep in an old Esci F4 Phantom box (yes, I know I should be ashamed, but it's a good size!), despite this precaution dust build-up makes the foil unusable within a few days. I started at the tail for no particular reason, but certainly a good idea is to start underneath, because one gets better at the job after the first month or so. Then it's just a matter of applying the foil, panel by panel, each panel is cut out using a VERY sharp knife. I use a snap-off blade because then I' m certain it's always sharp. I use various straight edges to cut along, there are some tricky bits between the nacelles where a short straight edge is useful, mostly I use the back of an old saw blade, or a steel ruler. I had to cut out a plastic template for the intersection between the fuselage and leading edge. I burnish on the foil using cotton buds, depending on how well it looks, I have 3 alternatives, a.) rip it off immediately, b.) it's OK, c.) try and sand off minor bits of dust and creases using 1000 grade wet and dry sandpaper. Finish up with Blue Magic custom car polish. It's amazing how well the sanding works on convex surfaces if they're not too big, Wings and other flat surfaces are often more difficult. The disadvantage of this method is that the foil becomes very shiny. This is, I think, OK for a polished or new aluminium plane of the late 30's up to the 60's when duller aluminium came into use. For a more used finish, either wait till the foil weathers naturally, or use matt varnish and abrasives.

A silly thing happened after a few weeks foiling, the polish must have got behind my finger nails somehow, my fingers swelled up so badly that I had to stop for a couple of days, a pair of cheap plastic gloves solved that problem.

The P38 has small oval mirrors on the inside engine nacelles, I think they are for checking if the undercarriage is up. It was Shane Weier of the WW1-list who tipped me off to using brass-tubing to stamp these out. I sharpened the end of a brass tube, and then flattened it a little in a vice, this gave me an oval stamp, which I could stamp out some shiny chrome ovals for the mirrors.

Painting

I couldn't find any decals for Cy Homer's plane, so I decided to do my own painting. I sprayed bright green paint on the spinners, and on some clear decal. I then sliced squares in the decal, not all the way through, just enough for the decal squares to separate. Each square is 2 X 2mm. it was a pesky business, getting all the squares in place, but after about 4 hours work it was done. The checkers aren't perfectly even, I suppose I could have tried harder , but I just don't believe the poor guy with a paintbrush full of green paint who painted the real thing was terribly good at it either. For the same reason (and laziness) I didn't seal everything with varnish, I doubt if the real thing had a uniform shine, so neither does mine, and the squares seem to be well stuck on.

I used the Hasegawa propellers because they fitted better, unfortunately they had no backplates, (the Revell kit does). I decided to paint first, then fill the holes behind the prop blades, and touch up at the end. I used a combination of paint and decals to do the white circles, I punched out circular bits of green decal, to make the edges sharp, and lots of Klear/future floor polish to cover a multitude of sins.

I masked off the anti-glare panels with a mixture of Parafilm and Tamiya tape. Of the two, I prefer Tamiya tape, this is wonderful stuff which sticks well, yet somehow magically it doesn't lift the foil when removed.

Stance

The P38 is very much a tail-sitter, and I made matters worse by correcting the skinny booms with milliput, so I knew I was going to need a lot of lead in the nose. I use lead from old wine bottles, and stuffed as much as I could into the nose area. I refuse to use a tail-prop, and glueing to a base isn't a good option because I keep my models on glass shelves, so I don't want a lot of bases stealing the light from the models below. One of the problems with the Hasegawa kit is that the stance is all wrong, a P38 should be more or less down at tail, depending on fuel load and other factors, the main undercarriage on the kit is too tall, so I shortened them and re-glued with a metal pin spliced in. This creates a tail-down attitude all right, but the nose wheel left the ground! So next step was to fill the spinners with lead, then I put the wheels on, this changed the angle again, and I found I had to go for my last resort solution, more lead in the nose bay. This spoils the interior detal of the nose bay, but of two evils, I chose the one where it looks correct from above. There's nothing I hate more than a model on tip-toes, so I'll go to any extreme to get that right.

Details

Fitting vac-formed canopies is something I'm just not very good at. This one was from Squadron and didn't quite fit. I did my best with epoxy, and even though there is a big risk of clouding I used CA too. I had deliberately refrained from foiling around the canopy, because I would certainly have ruined it. So after a lot of fiddling I managed to add the foil panels and cut a sharp edge against the canopy. It's not perfect, but at least more realistic than an injected canopy would have been. Canopy framing is a combination of decal on the inside and foil on the outside.

Antenna is stainless steel wire, bent at the join between the two wires, then wrapped with a little strip of decal.

Conclusion

This was a tough build, it took me nearly a year, and the result isn't as good as I hoped for. It's all too easy to make mistakes when trying to do too much. Still it means I have a decent looking P38 in my collection, and without compromises. I hope this doesn't hurt anybodys feelings, but to me Alclad, SNJ and all the other silver paints look just like that, silver paint. Even if my P38 is too shiny, it still looks more like polished aluminium than any paint ever will, and after twenty years on the shelf it will have dulled off to a really realistic finish, I just hope I'm still alive to see it!