1/72 Tamiya P-47D-15  

by Darrell Thompson

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           This is Tamiya's 1/72 scale Razorback built as Robert Johnson's D-15-RE. I added a few small scratchbuilt details to the cockpit such as the correct radio type, trim wheels, the seat support, control surface lock and the throttle lever. The seat was finished off with Eduards pre-painted belts, which I overpainted with a thin coat of paint because the stitching looked a bit prominent.

            The oil cooler outlet doors and deflectors were replaced with ones made from 10 thou plasticard since the ones on the kit are moulded at the wrong angle to the fuselage. I guess this is due to the fact that Tamiya didn't want to mould them separately like in their 1/48 scale kit, so they had to mould them at the only angle possible to get the fuselage halves out of the mould. The engine received ignition leads from thin electrical wire, I only did this to the front row of cylinders since not much would be seen once hidden in the cowling. The undercarriage legs also had some electrical wire added for the brake lines.

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The model is painted with Humbrol enamels using an Iwata HP-CS, the demarcation line was produced using rolled up Blu-tack. Chalk pastels were used for post shading after which several coats of Future were hand brushed on to give a nice smooth suface ready for the decals.

        The decals are from the Superscale sheet, well I say that but in the end the only items I used from this sheet were the fuselage letters. I though the kill markings looked really nice on the sheet because they had the name of the aircraft below each cross just like the real P-47, but when I put this decal below the cockpit I realised it was huge! (slightly bigger than it should be in 1/48 scale!) So searching through my decals I found the decals that come with the Kagero book, these had decals for Johnson's Razorback 'Penrod and Sam'. This aircraft had the same crosses but didn't have name of each kill so I went through the my decal box and found some small white stencils which I cut up and carefully applied individually. The national insignias came from the Expert's Choice decal sheet.

The final varnish coat is Poly Scale flat with a little satin mixed in. The paint chipping was done with a silver pencil. Tamiya P-47's are very nice kits, I like them so much I've already got 22 in 1/72 and 11 in 1/48 scale still to build, watch out for more P-47's soon.... 

Darrell (Tbolt in the forums) 

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Photos and text © by Darrell Thompson