Hello everyone.

I have decided to tackle Monogram's B-24 to see what I could do with it to correct its massive inaccuracies, as a back-up and distraction from other, much better Monogram kits like the B-26...

To my surprise, reducing the fuselage depth about 6 scale inches has gone very well, meaning I was now sucked into this "tentative" build...

The canopy is something else, and is so unlike the real thing (especially considering the minute excellence of Monogram's 1/48th B-26) that it seems to indicate the Monogram employees involved were in some sort of drug-induced mental derangement...

The following photos in no way exaggerate the disparities involved, although the rough shapes of my putty sculpting are not yet fully refined by a long shot.

My problem is that the smash-moulding material offered until recently by Squadron is the only thing that has offered good easy result in creating new clear parts for me, and I am nearly out of it... If someone has some or knows where to get it please contact me or post here...

Note that standard styrene clear sheets do not work like Thermaform: It has to be smash-moulding specific material. I was told some clam-shell type packaging can be used, but it will often be too thick for simple candle heating.

The disapearance of Thermaform has meant the end of most of my modeling projects, as even the Tamiya P-51D needs it badly, and not just because of the often pointed out canopy frame joint...

In any case here is a hint of the trouble that Monogram has foisted on us:





Very early corrective stage vs later corrective stage:





The sides of the nose piece needs to be flattened, and entire fuselage depth is reduced by about 3 mm...



Not the perfect aircraft reference I know, but still roughly indicative...:



The corrected shallower fuselage with flatter nose piece sides (the nose piece itself is also much shallower now):



The fuselage profile now, where the long cut to make the whole fuselage 6" shallower is visible... It now matches perfectly profile photos: Note how the tail extremity was not deepened, and so that tail depth is now in a correct ratio to the deepest fuselage portion:



An example of the real B-24D's peculiar canopy shapes, so different from the Monogram kit it is litterally incredible (note the much lower position of the real side windows versus the center of the canopy).:



The lenght of the canopy also had to be massive shortened, as well as the nose itself, to get "the look":



To put it in perspective, I still expect all this will be infinitely less time-consuming than the shape correction of my 1/48th Hasegawa Me-109G, because only the vertical aspect of the cross-section had to be changed here, while on the Hasegawa kit the cross-section needed to be changed both vertically and horizontally... Also 5-6 very time-consuming attempts were made by me to correct the Hasegawa nose, and my last attempt was a lot worse than my first... Finally, only the heavily re-shaped nose of an Otaki kit offered a marginal solution...

That being said, the Hasegawa Me-109 still looks a lot better overall than Monogram's B-24, perhaps because it is smaller and so it can get away with its mistakes easier...

Considering how excellent are Monogram's B-17G and B-26B, their B-24 really stands out as bizarre...

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help me with the Thermaform!

Gaston