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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