¹⁄48

MoM Winner - P-40E

Introduction
It might not be as popular as the P-51 or the P-47 in the modelling community, but few aircraft look so menacing with a shark mouth as the P-40 does. A while back I wanted to build an aircraft with a shark mouth, so Hasegawa’s 1/48 P-40E kit became the natural choice. After I acquired a suitable decal sheet from Eagle Cals (my Hasegawa box did have cool decals but no sharks or teeth) I was set to go. A P-40 campaign on Aeroscale even motivated me further to immediately begin my Project.

Hasegawa’s 1/48 P-40
While superior to older moulds from other manufacturers (like AMT or Otaku), Hasegawa’s kit does have a major problem that can really tire out the modeler. The kit has a very high-level of detail, but the fuselage was designed in multiple parts. I think this was done so Hasegawa can produce different versions of the P-40 (E-F-K-L-M-N… you name it) easily using the same moulds and parts. The setback is that these multiple parts do not fit together very well and if you follow the assembly steps in the instructions, you will possibly have a major problem in your hands since your model will probably be misaligned and misshaped.
The easy way out is first assembling the fuselage in two halves, then sanding and carefully rescribing as necessary. Once you get the two halves ready, the rest of the kit is very nice indeed.

Construction and Painting
The model was enhanced with several after-market items. I used an Eduard Zoom set for the cockpit and used photo-etched parts only to improve the plastic kit instead of replacing everything. The wheels were also changed with resin wheels from Ultracast and I think they were very well worth their money. I made the mistake of changing the Browning barrels on the wings with metal barrels from Master. Don’t do this unless you really feel you have to, as Master’s barrels are much thicker than the kit’s own barrels and replacing them will require lots of work… the end result is not worth it in my opinion.
Painting was done using Gunze Sangyo’s British Aircraft Color Set. I used Dark Green and Dark Brown over Azure Blue. Since the P-40E I was building was originally produced for RAF, it was painted with British colors, but then it was diverted to American forces in China. Since the colors were DuPont equivalents of original RAF colors, I added lighter greys into the colors to make them lighter.
China wasn't known to be an operational theatre known for its abundance of supplies and personnel, so I went for a well weathered look on my model. I tried to fade the colors significantly and created stains.

Conclusion
Apart from the fuselage multi-part problem, Hasegawa’s P-40 is a really nice kit. I might attempt to build another P-40 in the future, who knows? With its long service history in a wide range of air forces, the possibilities are endless!