This success in turn led to a dual build consisting of the Monogram and Tamiya D-25. I used the Tamiya as a template for the Monogram kit. This involved the scribing adventure and true details cockpit...



True details left, Tamiya right. With Tamiya, there really is no need for aftermarket anything!

As things progressed I decided to hit the Monogram with non-buffing aluminium (Model Master) as I have a lot in the reserves that need to be used, and it shows any flaws. At the same time I opted to cut the Tamiya kit loose from the build and did a gloss black base coat.





The gloss black showed a couple of minor seams that needed to be addressed...



This included polishing out an itsy bitsy spider web strand that landed just after I sprayed! It came out, and the repaired areas were black based again. Overall, the Tamiya kit is most impressive.

Unfortunately, I lack the pictures to show the silver paint revealing that the scribe work in most areas of the starboard fuselage were too shallow. This is where the current project hit a snag, causing me to revisit all the panel lines. Sigh... Undaunted, I did go ahead and start the painting of the true details cockpit.



I went with a base of aluminium on this in the hopes to do some minor chipping.

All said a pretty busy month eh? But wait! I was also able to begin the painting of the Tamiya D-25 to be done as "Ole Cock III". So far, it goes with such little effort and any errors are mine alone. I do like the Tamiya kit, though a bit pricey.

If it seems that there is a sense of urgency on my part, there is. After long consideration, I shall be joining my wife in Malaysia! Yay! This has led to the moving of my stash from here to there. This trip, a total of 32 kits.







To date, 60 are now there. With the big move coming in November, it appears that I'm going to have to find a better way to get all my stuff there! Also, does anyone know of a way to transport one's paints? I'm thinking I'm hosed here, but will ask anyway. Thanks!

John, good luck with the move, I hope all goes well!

Thanks for sharing the detail on your other builds, some very nice work going on there. The resin gun ports look great and seem to fit nicely.

Cheers, D

Damian, thank you. You're a great cheerleader, and certainly motivate me!

I liked how the gun ports turned out too! There was a lot of test fitting, and my first attempt securing them with superglue was a total failure. In a move of frustration I put a dollop of Tamiya basic putty on the backside and slapped them in place. Then scrapped away the excess, and let it dry overnight. Following the sanding they looked respectable, though the ports themselves were clogged with dried putty. I wound up drilling them all the way through fitting the barrels (18G medical needles). Using the canula of the needle as a cutting edge, I was able to twist out a custom fit! The barrels are held in place via friction. When I return back home I'll post the completed gun assembly. Thanks again!

Hi all,

I made it back almost in one piece. Caught a cold on the plane so it did put a slight dampener on the trip. Though overall it was a grand time!

As promised one of the better pics of the gun barrels in place on the "proof of concept" build. I think they are convincing.

Hi all,

So got to make the flaps look a little bit better than nothing on them. Some time back I purchased a RB rivet tool that will be used on the PBY... someday. I've goofed around and gotten the feel of it, and when looking at the naked flaps I thought "Here's an opportunity!". So I laid down some basic rivets. This was done using my friend the Dymo tape as a guide, kind of missed along the trailing edge, but was able to sand it mostly out.







I like the way tool works, but we'll have to see how they look after some paint.

Aside from this I took the time to cut the Squadron vacuformed canopy loose and masked it. This is an area of weakness for me, so practice was the call. Using thin strips of Tamiya tape to outline, and then fill in with bigger ones. Now I hope that they will come off when all is done!

Here I've cut and sanded it in the foreground.



Masking...



More masking... this took me the better part of a week. I found that when the tape was fighting me I'd give it some time to think about its lot in life, and then return. The tape did a lot of thinking.



Like all good things they do come to an end, thank goodness!



Test fitting of the canopy found it to be a near perfect fit, so if anything goes awry I'm blaming the tape!

The cockpit is kind of on hold as I'm waiting for some placard decals to arrive from the UK, and when they do I plan to spiff up the cockpit and think about closing up the fuselage. So far the sub-assemblies are finally coming together. Hope you all enjoy!

Great progress John. The riveting looks good, I have a similar tool that has not yet been fired in anger, but I plan to do a major makeover on a Monogram P-61, similar to what you are doing here, and it will definitely earn its stripes there.
The rivets are noticeable but not really prominent on the flaps, so yours should look fine.


Nice work on the glass masking as well, it's not my favourite task but if you do it well the end result can really make the build stand out.

Keep up the good work.

Cheers, D

Hi All!
As Damian pointed out I’ve not given an update in some time. Like most of us, life has been crazy busy. I have also been taking some time to enjoy a wonderful hobby and would like to share it!

The last couple of months have had some highs, and some lows. While using the Dremel to thin down the inside of the fuselage where the oil cooling vents (not the one in the pics above) something happened to my laser like attention which resulted in the thinned plastic to become molten. Attempts to fix are still underway! Given the yearend deadline I opted to pull a spare from the shelf and redo the port fuselage. Not to worry this will eventually grace the pages here



Shortly after this I did yet another bonehead thing. I have no explanation for it except that it sounded pretty good in my mind at the time. I recall reading where a modeler used thinner to aid in cleaning out the scribes, and about a year ago I really started playing with lacquer thinner with my paints. Learn from this please. DO NOT USE LACQUER THINNER IN THIS MANNER!!!! A momentary lapse, briefly forgetting that toluene is an ingredient of lacquer thinner… still not sure what I was thinking. Regardless, the upper surfaces of my wings suffered a nice wide valley on each side of the scribe lines.



Again with our time limit, and my slower building speed on this project, I opted to pull the wings from the spares kit. I also stumbled across an interesting read of a modeler scribing a kit where he followed pretty much the same method as I (originally from Mike Swan of Swanny’s Models website) except that he would sand about 80% of the original panel line off prior to scribing. I gave it a try, and I like this refinement much better. Less dust in the panel line and clean up is considerably less, which translates to reduced scribing time.



Now it was time to mate the wing halves and install the gun ports. This went pretty much as planned and done essentially the same as my D-25 concept builds.

Mating



Gun barrel alignment



Installation



The thickness of the wings can be seen here as the part will needed considerable filling on the underside.



This was followed by more filling and sanding, and then I notched the wingtips for the navigation lights.



While those dried I bounced back to the engine again, to address the prop that would go on. The kit’s prop isn’t bad, though a little small in the hub area. Having a left over Curtis prop from my Hasegawa build I chose to use it. To be blunt Hasegawa made something that should be pretty simple a major pain, though I think in this case it will work out well. With the True Detail motor putting a shaft in means that it needs to be pretty small. Using brass tubing I cut a lengths of 1/8th and mating 3/32nd inch tubing. The 1/8th inch went into the motor, and the 3/32nd into the prop hub. This did mean deepening and widening the hubs opening. I assembled the prop hub per the instructions and it turned out ok.

Hasegawa prop hub and brass tubing



Assembled and ready to be completely mated



My first attempt at getting it painted



There was a bit of rework needed, but it's turned out ok. I'll load more on this tomorrow. Time to call it a day!
Enjoy!

Major surgery seems to be a bit of an understatement here John, you have been chopping and cutting and filling in a big way!

Great to see some more work going on here mate, and some very useful tips thrown in for us as well, keep it going.

Cheers, D

Thanks Damian!
I always enjoy your positive reinforcement! Truth be told the progress on this build hasn't stopped. I have been leaning heavily on the concept II build which has taken this one much longer than usual. As much as I'd like to show you the completed prop hub, our site's upload function has decided to lie! After 8 attempts and each telling me that the upload is successful and complete, there's no new image.

So tomorrow is another day, and perhaps the site will be in a better mood!

Till then,
John

Hi all,
Ok the site wasn't lying. I wasn't reading the fine print regarding file size. Looks like a darker photo has more size, not sure why, but it is. So I couldn't load the pic that I wanted to of the completed prop hub, but here's a lower quality one.



I also took the clear sprue from the Tamiya kit as it has a nice hand hold area and taping some 600 grit to my plywood "mobile workshop", I sanded down one length to make a 90 degree angle. Polished it up using finer grits... next will be drilling some small holes and adding some clear red and clear green for the navigation lights!



Next up I'm trying to close up the fuselage so it will begin to look like a P-47. I've got the cockpit complete to do the test fitting. Since this resin cockpit wasn't really designed for this kit there will be a lot of test fitting!

Cockpit prepped for assembly



Initial test fit finds a huge space at the back of the cockpit/fuselage mating area!



Reworking the armor behind the headrest helps, but there still is a bit of an open space.



So now I'm in the process of using some carefully placed filler to close up the mating area.

I hope to mate the fuselages soon. Wish me luck and enjoy!

Finally!!! Woooooooo Hoooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!

Hi all,
My last installment was a bit on the thin side, though I was pretty excited to get things looking more like a P-47! I do know Damian wished to see how the cockpit went into this, so here it is! Needless to say the True details cockpit wasn't made for this kit and getting it to fit was quite a challenge. First off I removed the locating pins. I have found on this kit they are off by a red hair so lining up the scribe lines would be most difficult. Also during the scribe I didn't scribe completely to the edge for just this reason. During the countless trial fittings it was evident that the instrument panel was angled in causing the gun sight to be aiming high. To remedy this I used a spreader bar and some super glue to alter the instrument panel's angle.



Next was to use some sprue and the remainder of the spreader bar to act as a locating point and assure the cockpit being level.



At this point I closed off the openings inside using flat black painted stock to avoid see through, and it was time to secure the cockpit with a generous amount of superglue.



Prior to closing things up I added some thin stretched sprue to simulate the gun sight supports, and will also be the attachment support for the fixed guns sight seen in research (albeit not very functional according to Zemke). Then everything was aligned and glued together with some Tamiya extra thin glue.



Now it was time for seam clean up!

Hi all,

Monogram's P-47 kits suffer one area that really stands out, and that is the wheel wells. I've read many a remedy and not wanting to do a complete replacement I opted for a method described by a fellow modeler. This requires the sanding away the molded well and replacing it with sheet styrene and scribing the corrugations. My past attempts at this have been less than banner. However, I recently found some sheet styrene that has 1 mm groove, and is 2 thousands of an inch thick.

I took a photocopy of the paint chart from the instruction and blew it up to just over scale and was able to trace out a good start point for the wheel well replacement.



Next I ground away molded in area of the wells using a Dremel (gently!) on both the wing and fuselage areas until both were flush.

Satisfied with the initial fit, it was time to join the wings to the fuselage! Of the many versions of this kit I've seen most tend to join the top of the wing with fuselage and fill the underside. I've found that if you join the bottom of the wings to the fuselage you get a near perfect fit underneath and the angle of the wings are correct. This will leave a gap up on top that is relatively easy to fill.



The gap topside, taped and ready for filling.



I proceeded to fill the gap using Mr Surfacer 500. For some reason I had this fantasy of trying to keep the kits original rivets intact and tried a gentle filling of the gap.



So far the filling goes well, but the rivet detail is gone. I do have a tool however, and will consider replacing it. In hindsight I should have filled the gap with some stretched sprue or sheet, as the gap was a bit larger than expected. I think this could be due to using 2 different kits from different age molds. Though a good fit is coming along and the wheel well issue is resolved.

Hi all,

Apparently I can't leave well enough alone. After goofing off with the wheel wells I started looking at the main gear. The struts are a bit too narrow, so I took this opportunity to make new ones from some brass tubing.

First I measured the diameters of the Tamiya and Hasegawa kits as they seem more scale per photos. Then picked the brass tubing out of some spares.

The wheel/strut interface would be a real challenge to remake, and this portion seems to be in scale. So I cut the strut above the oleo and sanded to a point to fit into the brass. I also cut smaller lengths of brass to mimic the strut.



Next I took some sheet styrene and punched and opened a hole to allow the brass to pass through. Then cut and sanded to shape for the bottom part of the brass connection point. Satisfied I made small squares about 1 mm, and drilled holes into the center for the tow connectors.



I then superglued the brass and plastic parts together using extra thin superglue. The part that caused me concern was putting the cut kit part into the brass with a slight angle to represent the toe-in gear. So I made a jig that would allow the same angle for each strut.

Finally I used the wire initially intended for the engine push rods and cut them to length to represent the metal rod on the real struts (no clue what it's called). This also was super glued into place.




All this was done for a total of 4 main struts. A little filling here and there, and some paint is all that's really needed. I rather like the end result, and really got out of my comfort zone too!

Going great John, some serious rebuild and scratch building involved here!

Cheers, D

A week to go in the official time frame John, but I will allow an extra month on the end to get things finished up.

I hope all is well with you and you are managing some bench time.

Cheers and Merry Christmas, D

D,
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! I got back to the states from Malaysia pretty much resigned that if there was going to be a bird completed for the group build it would be the Concept II one. However, Santa apparently comes from down under! This is great news, and efforts have doubled to make the deadline. I thank you so very much!

Hi all,
It’s been a while, sorry. Life tends to move at life’s speed, though I’m pretty grateful that flu season has peaked and is on the down spiral for 2016/2017. I “officially” finished this project on Feb 11. Noting that the campaign was still open, I snapped some quick pics and posted them in the gallery. I did reserve the right to add a drop tank, something that I’d deliberated on for way too much time. In the end I did add one from an old Monogram P-40. Since no project is really complete till the paperwork is done I’ll fill in the rest of the story and wrap this up.

When I returned from my trip to Malaysia (move on hold till December), I saw that Damian had graciously extended the deadline! My efforts doubled to get this done. With the airframe complete it was time to start the painting process. I first black based the bird using Tamiya flat black to give the next coats something to grab onto. I have gone to thinning my paints 1 part paint, 3 parts lacquer thinner to start (or 1:4 dilution). With a little lower psi (10 – 15) I have found a nice paint job can be produced. I then began mottling the underside with Tamiya Neutral




Diluting the paint a bit more and the overcoat was done in roughly 3 separate coats. The goal is to create a neutral grey color that is not so monochromic, and when I do it right and the wind isn’t too high the panel lines will faintly show through.




I did compare the Tamiya underside to my previous Hasegawa build that was done with Model Master neutral grey. On first look the MM looks lighter than the Tamiya, though side by side pretty close, what did surprise me was how the weathering wash darkened the Hasegawa underside.

Next I flipped it over and did the uppers with Tamiya Olive Drab. This went down nicely, though to my eye a bit dark. This could be where the “scale effect” of adding white comes into play, not sure. Next, it was off to clear coating the bird.

At this time I was also bringing the Concept II D-25 along for the ride. Clear coats for all! Except something happened that I can’t explain, nor does there seem mention of it in all the modeling stuff I read. Using Tamiya X-22 clear, diluted with lacquer thinner, and a long session, I did the D-1 first, and followed with the D-25. I gave everyone a misting of lacquer thinner to help level it all out and then set to dry overnight. I was pleased with the job on the D-1, and mortified when I gazed upon the D-25. The clear coat shattered, but on the last portion of the plane I’d coated.



I first tried to hit it with more lacquer thinner. Nothing, then clear, the coat stayed in a shattered state. Then I used a little future floor, which seemed to soften the edges, but nothing more. Dejected, I got some 2000 grit sandpaper and slowly and gently wet sanded down the affected areas. There is still some to go, and I am losing the decals. I had really hoped to get it done and looking nice, but, it is a concept project and the gains have already been quite substantial in my modeling book.