‘Broke plastic,’ so to speak, on my newest project yesterday: Hobbyboss’s ‘Easy Build’ P-51D in 1/48.
No prizes for guessing where I’m going with it:
Interior details as supplied really aren’t too bad, but there’s no sidewall detail. I’ve got an old Eduard color ‘Zoom’ set – designed to replace or enhance molded detail for the Hasegawa kit – so I’m sort of ‘working backward’: fitting the ‘Zoom’ parts, then filling in around them to build out the detail.
One thing both surprised and delighted me. FSM’s old review of the kit notes that there’s a pesky mold seam running down the center of the clear one-piece canopy; in fact, it even seems to be depicted quite clearly in the current version of the kit’s instruction drawings! But in my kit the piece itself is actually beautifully thin and clear, with no hint of a seam. Looks like somebody, somewhere, is paying attention!
Greg, who makes the F-6 conversion pieces you are using? The only recon Mustang I’ve found is the Accurate Miniatures F-6B, which I built. Are you using the Quickboost conversion pieces?
No, Frank, after looking high and low for aftermarket versions…and finding diddly…I just made them myself.
The large port is a sanded-to-shape ‘collar’ section cut from an old Bic pen barrel, with a center section of Evergreen tube that happened to fit perfectly, all on a cut-out styrene disc. For the small one I drilled a hole in sheet stock, then punched the ‘ring’ out with a Waldron punch. (Took a few tries to get it centered properly, but that’s how it goes.) I still need to add the ‘rain gusset’ to the smaller port.
I’ve done some of their 1/72 quick-build kits…little more than ‘snap tite’ types, with a molded-in seat hole for a cockpit…but this is the first time I’ve done one of their larger offerings. The moldings are clean and so far appear to fit very well. What cockpit detail they do provide – seat (without harnesses), stick, radio rack and instrument panel – are fairly nicely detailed; but there’s nothing but flat plastic for the floor, and no sidewall detail as I mentioned earlier.
I guess they know their market-niche. Kids won’t care…and fools like us will buy them because they’re – ahem – ‘nicely-priced’…and be happy enough to add our own stuff as we see fit.
I think HobbyBoss can be hit-or-miss. I built their F4F-4 kit, and found it to be a decent kit, though I think that’s because it looks like it’s based very closely on Tamiya’s F4F-4. I have HB’s 1/700 Arizona on my Shelf of Doom. It’s not a very good kit; it can trace its lineage all the way back to the first Chinese copies of Revell’s Arizona, and it shows in the engineering. But it was only ten bucks, so it is what it is. I enjoyed the start of the project, converting the kit into the Pennsylvania circa 1935. But as I progressed, I became more and more disillusioned with the soft details, and the lack of others.
Hey Greg, nice start. I’m interested in seeing how it turns out.
Just a quick word of warning before you get too far into your build. Check the landing gear installation. I built one of these a little while back, and I noticed HB screwed up on the landing gear. If I recall, the gear legs are “keyed” to only be installed one way. If installed as is, the gear legs would be backwards with the oleo facing forward. Simply trying to turn them around gives the strut’s angle an odd rake. I remember I had to do some minor surgery on my build to get the legs installed correctly. I don’t know if HB fixed the problem with later boxings.
As it happens, that was one of the things mentioned in the FSM review…so I’ve already got a big highlighted circle on the instruction sheet, in case I missed it on my ‘pre-assembly inspection!’ (It’s still there, by the way; I guess HB figured re-tooling the molds wasn’t worth it.)
'Pit is neary finished, save for F-6D-particular features.
Under the heading “Why I love color photo-etch…(I don’t consider it ‘cheating’: I did this by hand for decades…),” we have the Hobbyboss kit panel on the sprue…and Eduard’s spiffy ‘enhancement’:
Best of all…a relative rarity in my experience…no trimming of the Eduard panel was required to get it to fit. [Usually it seems I end up having to severely trim panel edges to get them to fit in kits they weren’t specifically designed for…and, sometimes, in the kits they were designed for!]
Now I just have to scratchbuild the intervalometer – a photographic-control feature unique to the recce birds – and I’ll be ready to ‘button up’ the fuselage halves
I ended up cutting micro decal strips and adding the ‘main six’ instrument outline to the panel…mainly because it looked cool.
Final interior detail consisted pretty much of everything the Eduard ‘Zoom’ set supplied – mounted on scrap-styrene boxes and panels where called for, to give some depth – with a few vertical frames, and assorted solder hoses and lines for the oxygen, fuel tank and radio. Fun (but easy) scratchbuilt touches were the little flashlight-shaped fuel gauge for the tank behind the pilot’s seat…and the even-more-tiny alarm bell for the AN/APS-13 tail-warning radar on the right-sidewall panel.
A curious (and welcome) note is that the ‘generic’ Eduard set actually included a tiny panel which (as far as I know) was peculiar only to photo-recon versions of the Mustang: the camera-controls and circuit-breaker panel, which on the real a/c was wedged behind the throttle pushrods (in what surely must have counted as the last few square inches of ‘real-estate’ to be had in the crowded Mustang cockpit). Always grateful for one less ‘fiddly bit’ to have to scratch up…
…The last of which, as previously mentioned, was the intervalometer, essentially a programmable timing control for taking the photo sequences so vital to the reconnaissance mission. In the Mustang this was located on the cockpit floor just forward and to the left of the pilot’s seat:
