P-40E Capture aircraft in the Philippines – Arii

 

An old Out of Production kit from Arii picked up from a model show, done up in an interesting scheme.

A member on Finescale Modeler’s forum posted this picture and asked who wants to try building this airplane. It’s a P-40E captured by the Japanese in the Phillippines. It consists of a bright orange ‘hawk’ head in the nose area. I happen to have an old Arii P-40E kit that I picked up from a model show for maybe $5, so what the heck – it’ll be fun.
There’s not much to talk about in the build. It’s a fairly simple kit to put together, the cockpit details is fair so I added a bit some more using plastic rod. The kit comes with a complete engine, unfortunately, it’s not a very good representation so I’m just going to close it up.

  

Next the plane was primed with Tamiya rattle can primer followed by Olive drab, leaving the nose free so I don’t need too heavy of a light color coat to cover the darker drab.

  
Now comes some major masking with silly putty and painters tape. The nose was then sprayed with a signal Yellow mixed with a bit of Testors International orange. This was followed by some random blotches of a darker version of the same mixture.

  

The fine feathers were added with a stratight International Orange and a 000 brush. The eyes were painted at the same time.

  

The decals were home made as I couldn’t find 1/48th scale ones for this plane. I first put a layer of white decal to make sure the orange will not show through. Then the inkjet printed teetch was overlayed on top. This was followed by 4 or 5 applications of microsol. Not totally happy with it as the mouth is a bit too low and not curved enough compared to the actual photos, but hey this was to be a fast fun build, so I left it as is.

 

The rest of the decals was from my spare box, and after a final coat of flat, it’s done.