The Airbrush Company have released the latest images of GWH's eagerly awaited P-61A Black Widow.

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If you have comments or questions please post them here.

Thanks!

Very nice indeed, drooling on my keyboard now !!

Any comments on the quality of GWH decals ?

Cheers, D

It does look great.

With all the fuss this has created recently, I'm really looking forward to it.

Let's hope the still-unseen clear parts are or will be corrected from the CADs we saw...

Gaston

Gaston

If you are talking about the sliding window next to the pilot being incorrect, I suggest that you look at the photos online of the P-61.

A quick browse even through Google will show you that the window does indeed look to have an extra frame due to it being able to slide to the rear.

Of course as is your wont, don't mention all the work that GWH have put into making a state of the art 21st century kit of the P-61.

As I had pointed out before: The chances are less then slim. Try learning to live with it! It'll help you to cope with your endless disappointments this hobby is holding in store for you. This P-61 kit will be a vast improvement over the choices available to date. If that isn't good enough, there's no helping you. I really wonder when you last felt a feeling of "fun" or "joy" when you looked at a model: AFAIK the "100% perfect" model kit has yet to be released.

I for one am really looking forward to the kit release. I have yet to see the plastic in the flesh (but hopefully without any) and being involved in the process of development I am really excited to see, what came of all the work!


Cheers,
Guido

Very excited , now i can put my Monogram kits up for sale and build this fancy new Widow!

I'm also very excited by this. I built the Monogram as a young man, and it will be nice to have a modern tooling for a new build. Thanks, Guido, for helping this one along.

I'll take state-of-the-art tooling over 100% accurate, in most cases. Gaston, I'm one of the folks that didn't "get" the red and blue lines you drew on a pic in the previous topic. Therefore, any problems can't be in the same league as the AZ Lily (Ssssh!) that you were right about, so perhaps some context is in order. The Lily was neither state-of-the-art nor even 90% accurate.

Regards - Tom

I was not talking about the sliding pilot side window,,,

I was talking about the canopy rounded-box shape with "corners" where no corners exist, and quaterlight front windscreen proportions (peaky in real-life and thus not low and squat)...

Also, the real openable canopy top panel TAPERS severely towards the front, while this new 2011 kit appears to barely do so if at all (like the 1973 Monogram).

While it will probably be a huge improvement over the Monogram kit, and having said so already (I don't how many times I am required to say it), not improving radically on the biggest problem of a 38 year old kit is still a big miss...

Falcon/Squadron has apparently stopped offering new products, so it up to a dicey, frameless through polishing (and thus very hard-to-mask) candle-smash-mould concoction yet again...

90% of my building time is spent fixing manufacturer errors, and I simply don't have the time anymore to put up with this... 6 straight months fixing a Monogram B-24 canopy (and entire front fuselage)... 3 years fixing Hasegawa's Me-109G's nose (even with direct access to an original for measurements)... 4 years wasted on a B-29 fuselage incurably assymetrical from nose to tail...

Zvezda's Me-109s and Modelsvit's Yak-1b ARE models that I will build (especially the Yak-1b in many multiples because it is stunningly perfect)... But I simply don't have the time anymore to polish a master and smash-mould my own canopies...

There is less and less time to do things, and modern models should spare us crude mistakes.

Gaston

Send them to me Mike, I love the old Monogram kits and when I can pick them up for $15-$20 Aussie at swap meets they still hold great value.

I will be picking up a couple of the GWH kits when they are released for sure and it will be interesting to display them side-by-side for comment.

Cheers, D

On the Hyperscale I have found some close-ups of the sprues

Link to Hyperscale

Pre-order

Not long now folks

Thanks for that link Michal & Damian, The level of detail is beautiful. Might have to consider this along with the Tamya P51 decisions decisions

Well will you look at that...



Tapered upper window, cockpit canopy cross-section looks good... Hard to make out the exact shape and proportions of the forward 'quarterlight' panels but even so it seems all your whinging was for nothing Gaston!

Maybe waiting until the plastic has been pressed would be a good idea in future instead of slagging off yet another kit new kit based on crude reproductions of CAD images, wouldn't you agree?

Hi all

Look what Postie just delivered!



I'll get cracking on our own sprue-shots this afternoon. I take it no-one's really interested in the canopy, so I might skip over that...

All the best

Rowan

Oh, damnation! I'm running out of space!

About those CAD images- any rendered image of a data file can be presented in various ways: with or without perspective, etc. This can be very mis-representational as to exact shapes and porportions as perceived in the image vs. an actual 3d, material production from the file.

I'm glad the final looks so good!

Hi again

After all the "does it taper, or doesn't it?" worries about the canopy, on first inspection there might be a different little "wrinkle" in it to argue over. But you'll have to wait for my review to see what it is...

Oh aren't I a tease!

All the best

Rowan

Damn! My samples arer still in the mail somewhere. The clear parts look great, IMHO!
Oh, the suspense...
Guido

Hi Guido

I've shot and edited all the pics and I'm just off to do a test-fit, so I'll try to put you out of your suspense later this evening.

All the best

Rowan

It really sounds to me like you need to find a new hobby. This one apparently is no fun any more which is the point. Maybe needlepoint or quilting or something. We'll try to slog through the hobby without your trained eye, ah the pain of it all. Jim

Sorry, but this release is a huge disapointment, and in no way compares with Great Wall's previous release, their very decent FW-189.

All the GW FW-189 needed was a pair of spacers to blow the boom's plan view into an aerodynamic shape, and a bit of sanding to round off the upper glass corners, plus a few other details...

I actually think they got a bum rap over the so-called "thick" glass frames, given how acceptable the effect was, and how much worse is Tamiya loathsome Fi-156 Stork in this specific area, plus many other absurd outline mistakes (probably the least accurate Tamiya release in ten years or more)...

Every point I made about this new P-61's canopy from the CADs is more than completely confirmed, and several new wrinkles were added elsewhere in the kit.

I'll start with the main "novelty"...

As pointed out on Hyperscale yesterday by someone else, the cowls exhibit similar shape errors to those found on the 12 year old Accurate Miniatures B-25's dreadful cowlings: We now know where the guy who did those cowlings found employment...

This is utterly amazing: They obviously copied all the errors of the 38 year old Monogram canopy, couldn't they have at least copied the excellent unopened Monogram cowling?!?

Anyone wishing to accurize this new release will now have to get TWO Monogram kits, because the Monogram kit comes only with ONE useable cowling... Good thing they are cheap...

These GW P-61 cowls are actually much worse than AM's B-25 cowls, because they cannot be simply "bored out" to shape, since they incorrectly TAPER from front to back (again, as correctly pointed out on Hyperscale yesterday by someone else)...

The presence of accurate cowls from the Monogram kit prevent this particular issue from being the complete disaster it could have been...

Now for the real disaster:



http://www.militaryfactory.com/aircraft/imgs/northrop-p61-blackwidow_2.jpg

First, do you see how different the top armored windshield is from the bottom armored windshield?!?!?: It is the SAME part in real life, and should sit at the same angle.... Even the Monogram's 38 year old dreadful canopy at least got the armored windshields similar...

I have tried to correct by smash moulding the old Monogram canopy, and it is nearly impossible because not only is the entire geometry of the front fuselage completely different from the real thing, but also the Monogram's front fuselage is assymetrical, which does not help... Smash moulding required two separate parts to deal with the "stepped" appearance of the canopy. It was hopeless...

This canopy is an almost exact replica of the Monogram canopy in the "squarish" cross-section, except that a few errors (relatively minor ones at this level of awfulness) were added...

One thing for sure, the CADs proved exactly predictive of what a disaster this kit would be...:





I think these photos demonstrate clearly there is NOTHING squarish about the cross-section of the real canopy's front section...:





But hey, nobody is preventing you from assuming a lotus position, meditating with carefully controlled breathing, and then ignoring this...

If you are going to buy a kit from Great Wall, at least buy their FW-189, by all accounts an honest kit with a few errors. This is not in the same league, and is a strikingly untalented copy of the 38 year old Monogram kit, itself one of the most embarrassing kits Monogram ever blundered into a box...

In this case, the emperor simply has no clothes...

Gaston

P.S. Also compare Revell's superb new PV-1 to see just how truly inexcusable this is... G.

Gaston, how can you possibly make an interpretation of a photograph taken on an oblique angle and then use your impressions to make authoratative statements on the shapes of flat surfaces? You have no idea what distortion was introduced by the lenses involved, let alone any other reproduction errors that may have occurred between the actual item and your computer screen.

Then you compound your error by making reference to other photos, taken by other unknown lenses and subjected to who knows what post-production mainpulations before they made their way yet again to your computer, there to be processed again by your video card.

You are making statements that what you present as evidence has no way of proving. You also really need to learn how to draw; the lines you scrawled all over that canopy pictue are way off true. If I were to have given that drawing to my boss, I would have been fired right on the spot.

I second Jim Whitbread: If this hobby gives you this much trouble, then maybe you should rethink your participation.

I'm going to invoke the Gaston Rule: Gaston hates it, therefore it must be good.

I will happily second that Jessie. All those in favor signify by saying aye! Now that's not eye Gaston, just in case your image doesn't properly represent my statement. You can't trust these darn images you know. Have a picky day my friend.

Feel free not to buy it Gaston. You seem to find fault with every single kit that is released. I presume you don't buy, or build, many kits if they are all so bad.

Hi Gaston

As you'll see in my review, I'm not convinced by the cowls either - but I'll have to disagree with you on the issue of the taper, because the full-sized cowlings clearly taper in all the photos I've checked.

All the best

Rowan