This is the Tamiya offering straight out of the box with Eagle Strike Decals. I'm working on the Verlinden PSP resin base to put it on. ALclad undersides. I'm starting to like that stuff.

Comments and critiques appreciated

Hi Justen.
Fireball is one of my favourite P-47 M's.
Comments?
Have you visited Kitmakers P-47 website yet?
A very nice job of the Tamiya kit, well done!
The exact shades of blue used on the 63rd FS "M"s will never been known, and yours look just fine. What did you use to achieve the colours?
The area on the inside of the flaps would have been metal and not zinc cromate I believe, and photos of "M"'s dont show an ariel wire.
All in all a really nice finish, those 63rd FS P-47's are possibly the best looking T'bolts ever
Nige

For the dark blue I used Tamiya XF-8 Flat Blue toned down with XF-64 Red Brown (only a drop or two.) The light blue was XF-23 Light Blue made a touch darker with the XF-8. I don't have exact proportions, I did it by eye until I got something resembling Brett Greens example in his book. I liked his build and wanted one for myself

I was not aware that the flaps were NMF inside. I have done so many and seen so many D's with the chromate yellow that I just assumed the M's would be too. I may just respray those flat aluminum, won't be too hard to get them off and masked. Thanks for the info.

As far as the aerial, I spent too much time and vulgarity getting that one on... it's staying...

I agree...I think that the 56th FG had the best paint schemes of the war. It helped too that the guys painting the nose-art had such a big "canvas" to work with.

Cheers!

A beautiful, beautiful model. I really like the colors of the 56th fighter group 63 fighter squadron as you can see by the P-47M I built a few years ago. As I mentioned to Lampie, my blues are not quite as starkly different as yours and his but no one is quite sure how blue was one blue versus another. I really enjoyed painting mine though, British Azure Blue over just Blue.

Again, your work is outstanding and I look forward to seeing more of it here. Russell

Thanks Russell for the kind words. Yours looks really good. Thats one of the great things about modelling the 56th is no one can tell you, "that's wrong." You can pretty much paint them as you like. Your's makes me think, how cool would it have been to see the jug in Navy colors? I think the Atlantic scheme white and gray would suit the big radial engined monster nicely