P-59 Airacomet -6th in the “Tex” Hill Series -Hobby Craft

Hobby Craft P-59 Aerocomet – 6th in the Tex Hill series

 

This is a decent kit from Hobbycraft, the only thing really lacking is a good cockpit. Note that hobbycraft has 2 of these kits out, the YP prototype and this later p-59A. I had the older boxing, so I had to create a fillet at the bottom of the fuselage to match the A version.  Do yourself a favor, just get the newer A version boxing. 

The cockpit Is pretty devoid of details, but in fairness, once closed up, you can’t see too much.  But being modelers, we are going to add those details anyway, arent’ we?  So, first thing was to add some ribbing details with styrene strips. Various left-over PE and plastic parts were used to fill in the void. A map case was fashioned with styrene sheet. After painting, everything was integrated with a dark brown oil wash.

 

The same thing was done to the other side wall, along with placards from an Eduard prefinished placard set and PE seat-belts. A styrene sheet was used to create a firewall  with soldering material acted as piping and wiring behind the instrument console.

Next up for some attention was the radio stack behind seat, this area was had really very little detail.  So the same use of PE (from an old Royal pe consoles set) and more styrene and soldering bits were used to create the details.  Painted black and edges brought out using a silver artist pencil.

The rest of the kit was fairly straight-forward with a minimum of filler required. Using a  gloss black as a base, Hawkeye (now defunct) acrylic aluminum paint was used after giving it a good 24 hrs for the black to dry.

 Various panels were masked and resprayed with different metallics (white aluminum, steel) to create different sheens. The walkway and antiglare panel was painted on, and then it was time for decals. The decals came from Cutting Edge CED48254 “Airacometns #2”.