IPMS Kit Review: Hasegawa 1/48 P-40N 15000th Anniversary

Hasegawa

1/48 P-40N 15000th Anniversary

Kit Number: 09740

Reviewed by Fred A. Amos, IPMS# 6672

MSRP: $36.95

From the Squadron Signal P-40 Warhawk Walk Around:

The P-40 was one of the most important fighters of World War II. Although its performance did not compare to other fighters of the day, the P-40 was used successfully on all fronts. P-40 production went on for five years, during which 13,737 were produced. In 1941 and 1942, some 6699 P-40s were manufactured, compared to 1,469 P-38s, 2898 P-39s, 531 P-47s 767 P-51s.

The P-40 was flown by most of the Allied air forces. It was one of the most important fighters of the British and Commonwealth forces in Africa and Asia. It was also the mount of the legendary "Flying Tigers", the American Volunteer Group, who helped defend China against the Imperial Japanese Air Force.

This kit represents the 15000th fighter built by Curtiss. It was given this special paint scheme in November of 1944, with the national insignia of all the Allied countries which used Curtiss, although not necessarily the P-40. Some of the countries visible are Cuba, China, France, England, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Russia, Turkey, Columbia, Netherlands East Indies, Free French, and Portugal. Not shown are several insignia of Axis Air Forces that flew captured P-40s, such as Germany, Japan and Finland.

The Kit:

Of course building the Hasegawa kit is a pure delight for me. I have wanted to see this marking scheme released for many years, since I found the 1980 booklet Famous Airplanes of the World. The booklet has some English translation along with the predominately Japanese. There several photos of the aircraft in it, and three are in beautiful color.

As with almost all kits these days, construction begins with the cockpit. While the cockpit is drying you can go ahead and assemble the fuselage and wings because the cockpit can be slid into the bottom of the fuselage. It is a perfect fit. The long tail of the -N is not quite so perfect a fit but it is decent, just be sure the fore and aft parts line up properly before the liquid solvent is gently applied. The wing to fuselage join leaves a very slightly gap at the wing root. I overcame this by gluing the fore and aft of the wing at the bottom of the fuselage and then placing a heavy rubber band wing tip to wing tip and applying Ambroid Pro-Weld with a paint brush onto the gap. Draw the brush down along the joint, let it set for 30 minutes, and remove the rubber band. In about four hours you can run a fine piece of sandpaper or sanding stick over the blemished plastic and after it is painted you will never know you had a problem.

There were a few minor problems with this kit. As can be seen on the kit box front, there are three bombs mounted under the airplane. The kit only provides one 500 lb. bomb and a fuel tank. Many of the P40-N fighters had a bomb rack under the wing between the leading edge and the hinges of the under wing gun access panels. The kit does not provide these. However this kit was built as a generic P-40 meaning that by using various parts included you could build it as an -E, K, or N. There are several parts in the kit that would have been used in the -E or -K but not in the -N. One of these items is the gun camera enclosure that was used on the -E. Since this is the fourth -N kit I have built I had plenty of the parts in the spares box. I assembled two sets of these and filled the hole (for the camera lens) with stretched sprue and sanded it down. I drilled two holes under each wing in the appropriate location and glued my bomb racks in place. After this had dried sufficiently, I drilled a 1/16-inch into the bottom of the rack, more on this later.

I scrounged around in my parts box and found two 500 lb bombs from an old 1/72 scale Hasegawa P-47 and assembled them. I plugged the two mounting holes with tapered stretched sprue and sanded it down. I drilled one 1/16th inch hole in the side of the bomb between the plugged mounting holes. After the bombs were painted I stretched some more sprue and cut a piece the correct diameter and glued that in the hole in the side of the bomb. I cut that sprue down to about 3/16 inch long and glued that into the hole in the bomb racks. The kit instructions had indicated the color of all three bombs tail fins to be Olive Drab but the photo on the kit box clearly shows them to be orange. I couldn't bring myself to try to add the anti sway fixtures to the small bombs. All four would have landed right on a decal and didn't want to take a chance on ruining them.

Another very minor problem was that the larger decal parts did not want to slide once they were off the paper backing. It takes a lot of flooding and patience to get them in place. Consequently I damaged the bottom of the shark's mouth trying to stretch it with Champ decal solution. And yes, I suggest that you use Champ solution to get the decals to snuggle in the recessed panel lines.

All in all this kit was a delight to build and the wait was well worth it. I am hoping that Hasegawa will eventually come out with the other P-40 variants namely the F. L, and M. Thanks to the Hasegawa and the IPMS Reviewer Corps for allowing me to build this kit

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