Kit: No. HC1451
Scale: 1/48
Manufacturer: Hobbycraft Canada, 140 Applewood Crescent, Concord, ON
L4K 4E2, Canada, phone 905-738-6556
Price: $15.98
Comments: Injection molded, 71 parts, decals.
Last year’s surge of new P-40 kits didn’t include the early Tomahawks, but Hobbycraft Canada has fixed that omission. This kit’s light gray parts show fine recessed detail.
As I looked into the box, some parts seemed odd for P-40s until I realized that Hobbycraft had borrowed one sprue from its P-36 kit. Most of these pieces are for the cockpit interior, but several parts are left over for the spares box. Flattened and bulged tires are provided, too.
The interior is basic and adequate for the scale, but advanced modelers will want to flesh it out. There is no interior color information in the 10-step instructions, but good exterior painting and marking diagrams are provided.
I sprayed my interior Floquil Classic interior green, except for the black instrument panel and side-wall boxes. The fuselage halves were glued together before I installed the cockpit interior.
The fuselage halves fit fine, except on the bottom just behind the wing joint. I didn’t spend much time filling there since the gap is covered by the ventral bulge. The radiator intake fit without filler, and the wing fit well, too — just a little filler where the ventral bulge overlaps the rear fuselage.
After fitting the wing, I noticed the front of the wing sits about 1/8″ too high on the fuselage and the ventral bulge is too shallow at the front. The errors combine to produce a much-too-large step between the cowl flaps and the bulge. Fixing it takes considerable expertise, and beginners would best ignore it.
The rest of the parts fit well. Hobbycraft provides markings for two planes from the American Volunteer Group: No. 77 flown by R.T. Smith, and No. 67, an unassigned plane without a shark’s mouth. For me there was no choice: A P-40 just doesn’t look right without teeth on the nose.
The 100 P-40B/Cs issued to the “AVG” originally were destined for Great Britain. When the Royal Air Force decided to wait for the more powerful P-40E’s, the planes were shipped to Clair Chennault’s outfit in China. Most of these already were painted in British colors, so I used Floquil British dark earth, dark green, and sky on my model. After painting the top overall dark earth, I masked four-foot circles on the wing (used as locators for the British roundels), then airbrushed the dark green pattern.
Several markings come as two-part decals. While this requires more time to apply, color registration is under your control, rather than that of the decal printer. Solvaset helped snuggle the markings down into the panel lines.
Drilling out the exhaust stacks was easy and improved their look. The tail-wheel attachment is weak, and probably won’t tolerate much handling. The clear parts are thin and fit well, and the canopy can be positioned open or closed. The rear windows should have vertical braces rather than angled as given. The pitot tube and gunsight are too heavy for this scale.
The kit matches almost perfectly the dimensions in Squadron/Signal’s Curtiss P-40 in Action. I spent about 13 hours building my P-40. Beginners will find it easy to build, and experts will find challenge in correcting outlines and detailing the cockpit.
John Plzak