So my son got a Revell P-38 for his 10th birthday from a friend of his. I decided it was time for model building 101 not knowing how bad of a kit it is. I quickly gave up and we just slapped it together as a toy. Next I bought the Minicraft kit. Just got done looking it over and lets just say I am not impressed. Reading of the recent thread of the Hasagawa build was a let down as I would expect more from them. So my question is: does anyone make a decent 1/48 P-38J?
Tim
Well, from what I’ve heard the Academy and Hasegawa kits are probably best but both have issues in different places. Seems there isn’t a really good kit in 1/48th- only so-so ones.
Tim;
I keep going back to the Revell/Monogram P-38-J . Why ? well I make them natural metal which is a lot of foil .Now it seems to be a good model .
True she’s showing her age . I have not built Hasegawa’a or Academy’s kits nor do I plan too . Now if Trumpeter comes out with one , even though I don’t need it I will buy one .
I would give the Revell /Monogram kit a shot . T.B.
Tim,
You mentioned that you use foil for youe NMF. Can you post some examples of your work?
Johnny
I have 3 of the Monogram (Revell) P-38s on my bench. Started them 5 or 6 years ago got sidetracked and decided to finish them this summer. Doing the J fighter, F-5 recon bird and the M night fighter. Planning, patience, putty more planning and sandPaper–the 5 Ps of P-38 building 
Almost done with the M and F-5, and I plan to foil the J using a technique I learned in a 1989 FSM article.
If you look back to the last Monogram Mafia group build you can see a P-47 that I foiled with this technique. Also have a Mono P-51 thats held up for 25 years with foil.
I’m not a huge P-38 fan; however, to this day I can’t belive an excellent offering does not exist.
Lockheed did…
I’ve built the Revell 1/32 which is dated, and the Academy 1/72 which was a nice model. Thats about it.
Not any help with the original question, but I really need to keep all beverages away from the laptop. Oh well, needed a washdown for dust anyway.
The only problem from a modeler’s standpoint…it was 1:1 --hard to put on the shelf or hang from the den ceiling.
I just finished Hasegawa’s J and am currently building Eduard’s G reboxing of the Academy kit (see the threads in here). I can truly say at this point they are both challenging. The Hase version gets the nod on out of the box detail and Academy a slight edge in ease of build. Hobby Boss has an L now which is supposed to be an engineering marvel, but I have yet to try it. Hope this helps…
You are right P-38 models are getting a little long in the tooth,we could use a nice new tooled version for sure.
I’ve done two Hasegawa 38’s (one was a re-box from…ProModeler???).
Honestly, I really don’t recall any “deal breaker” issues. I’d build it again!
I have yet to ever build a P-38. I heard about the issues with just about every kit out there and I’ve not decided to take up the challenge.
But if I run accross the Revelogram kit I will probably accept the challenge lol. I’ve been experiencing a lot of nostalgic feelings building these kits. 
This would be a great candidate for a 1/32 scale Tamiya kit!
Yep, I’m surprised Tamiya hasn’t had a go at this subject yet.
Academy 4 n 1 P-38 is said to be one of the better P-38 Lightning kits out there.
However, doing a kit using BMF is ridiculous. It’s fine if you’re doing it as a restored version but as a true WW2 bird during the war? No. Not realistic since none are shiny to begin with. Use Tamiya bare metal silver instead.
The Academy (or Academy-Minicraft) kits are very good IMO. The only thing I feel you need details for is the cockpit. The IP (like Monogram’s) is just a flat section you add a decal to it. The True Details resin cockpit fits very well and is usually pretty cheap. The Minicraft (without the Academy connection) are pretty poor and IMO not worth bothering with. I haven’t built the Hasegawa kit so can’t comment on that. The Monogram kit is ok, but it will need a lot more work than the more modern kits.
If you don’t mind building in 1/72, the Hobby Boss is a nice little kit. It goes together in top halves and bottom halves. The wings, fuselage, and booms are molded as one piece, but in separate halves, so keeping everything aligned theoretically is taken care of. The only alignment problem I can remember was making sure the ends of the horizontal stabilizer in back were aligned, because it consists of three pieces. Eduard does a canopy mask and PE set for it, which it doesn’t do for most of HB’s 1/72 stuff. Plus, there is plenty of room to put enough weight in to make sure she sits on all three. I just need to finish mine.