1/32 Trumpeter P38L-5-LO Lightning

Gallery Article by Niall Cairns on June 22 2009

 

I normally stick to anything with a gas turbine engine in it but the Lightning is the coolest WWII plane in my opinion. So I thought I'd take a break from jets and painting planes gray and do the Lightning with my first NMF.  I have to say that at first I really did not enjoy building this model much. I had a lot of fit issues and of course the more sanding the more scribing and putting rivet detail back! Then of course there's the weight issue. This thing takes 60g to not sit on it's tail. So forget displaying the gun bay open. I had weight jammed into both engines and the gun bay and the nose! It just balances forward. Crazy. There were some bad fit issues here and there, but slowly I worked through them. I almost binned this model a few times, but for the money it cost I'm way to cheap!

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I built his model completely OOB. I didn't even bother to do any additional detail. I hoped that it wouldn't matter if I pulled off the NMF I had in mind for it. This was the first time I'd done that and I really thought about all my options. Foiling was considered but Alclad2 won out in the end. I sprayed a coat of Krylon black gloss paint for my undercoat and then used polished aluminum, white and dark aluminum and a touch of stainless steel. The black is Tamiya flat black. I used the kit decals which were a little sparse but went on ok. I wanted it to look like a museum piece so that's what I used for my reference pictures.

There were a few firsts for me here and there was definitely a learning curve with the Alclad. Lessons like that white aluminum has extremely poor adhesion to polished. There was some lifting.... and some crying. But I got through and honestly I couldn't be happier with the results. Thanks for looking!!

Niall Cairns

Photos and text © by Niall Cairns