P-59A Airacomet

by Rob Woodbury

Hobbycraft's 1/48 scale P-59A Airacomet is available online from Squadron

Inspiration leads to perspiration

It’s not happened often to me but I bought the Hobbycraft P-59A Airacomet at a recent club meeting and felt inspired enough to start on this kit right away. Being something of a fan of US Navy aircraft I really wanted to build the aircraft and finish it in the interesting dark sea blue and yellow Naval Air Test Centre (NATC) scheme.

Detail Sets

For some odd reason the True Details resin sets were available here in Australia prior to the arrival of the Hobbycraft kits (due late Nov 2003). This was a bonus since the detail sets would be easy to come by. True Details produce two sets for the P-59, a cockpit detail set and replacement wheel set for those who’d rather not use the rubber tyres provided in the kit.

The True Details cockpit set is very well detailed and worth the money, it improves the model considerably. The cockpit sidewalls are beautifully rendered and thoroughly detailed. The instrument panel and the remaining cockpit details (floor, seat, and gun-sight) are well done. Careful painting and dry-brushing will bring out the details beautifully.

The wheel set is also very nice. There are two nose gear wheels- one with and one without a cover over the wheel. The main wheels are well detailed and the tyres are bulged and have a very nice diamond tread pattern. The overall quality is very high. No complaints here.

Cockpit

Construction started with painting, assembling and detailing the cockpit area. Following the colour recommendations that come with the TD set and other reviews I set about painting it the required Testors Model Master “European Green” FS 34092. I then dry-brushed the raised detail with Testors Model Master “Green Zinc Chromate” followed by a final dry-brush with metallic powder. This gives an effective lived-in appearance. This finish was applied to the cockpit sidewalls, floor and seat. The raised moulded detail in the kit was removed and the new resin parts put in place with CA glue.

The True Details resin parts are so well designed that they just slip in to place once the kit sidewall detail is removed, no thinning or other adjustments are required. The new cockpit floor was put in place and the fuselage halves were closed up. I had also taken the step of gluing the tail section to the forward fuselage halves prior to gluing them together. The rest of the construction then progressed normally. The kit parts fit together beautifully and there is minimal seam to deal with.

A Mystery...

Curiously, the kit instructions fail to mention the intake splitter plates. These are included in the kit and are shown in a drawing on the instruction sheet but no mention of which one goes where…

After a bit of dry fitting and experimentation and using other reviews as a guide I came to the conclusion that part 18 fits on the fuselage left and part 20 on the fuselage right. Two further jobs to do at this point- the splitter plates need to be thinned and a thin strip of plastic glued to the back to keep the splitter plate away from the fuselage. The splitter plates were then glued in place. I realised at this point that the top and bottom of the splitter plates do not blend with the top and bottom of the wing as the real ones do. However, I didn’t feel that the extra time and effort was warranted to correct this.

Wings

The wings were tackled next. The wings, on the whole, fit together quite well. As suggested in other reviews I removed the locating pins to make fitting the halves a little easier. The top of the wheel wells needs to be thinned somewhat to allow a better fit of the flaps. The flaps and ailerons were attached next. In my opinion these are the worst fitting parts of the kit and, although I may be mistaken, it also appears that the flaps are indicated the wrong way around on the instructions even though they can only fit one way. Even following numerous dry fits of the parts I was unable to achieve a good fit and some large gaps were apparent. I finished up by filling these with plastic strip and achieved an acceptable finish.

The ailerons were next. I decided to concentrate on ensuring a good fit to the top of the wing since the reference photos I have seem to indicate fairly large gaps on the underside of the real thing anyway.

The intake trunk was next. I had two choices here. To either blank off the intake or to leave it open and put a piece of card over the gap to prevent a view down in to the wing. Blanking off the intake proved to be very difficult due to the shapes and different diameters within the intake. I then placed a blanking card over the wing hollow and proceeded to paint the intake area (wing and fuselage) Testors Model Master “Dark Sea Blue” FS 15042.

Wings to fuselage, tail surfaces and other odd jobs.

On the whole the fit is very good. With little to do in the way of clean-up of the joints, most of that is limited to the bottom of the fuselage. The top join is well hidden by a fillet that runs the length of where these two surfaces meet. Well thought out Hobbycraft.

The tail surfaces fit was a little less inspirational but nothing a few minutes with sandpaper couldn’t fix. To ease attachment of these surfaces I removed the location lugs and butt joined the surfaces using CA. The moveable tail surfaces were glued in place next.

The ventral spine was attached next and to finish off, the forward and rear sections of the canopy were glued in place using white glue as was the clear nose section. The forward section of the canopy required some sanding and filler to improve the fit.

The painting was undertaken next using Testors Model Master paints. Following the kit box painting guide the wings and horizontal tail surfaces were sprayed using Gloss Insignia Yellow or “Chrome Yellow” FS 13538. A number of coats of yellow were required to give a good depth of colour.

Allowing a day to dry the yellow areas were masked off and Gloss Dark Sea Blue FS 15042 sprayed over the remaining areas. Only a couple of light coats were required to give the blue good depth of colour.

Decals and more mysteries

Despite my best efforts I was unable to find a single photographic reference of the NATC’s P-59. This proved to be somewhat frustrating as I examined the decal sheet and discovered a set of white markings that were not mentioned at all on the painting and decal guide. My only option was to use as a guide the NATC P-59 featured on a well known resin model manufacturer’s web site. Now the doubts crept in since that P-59 featured a blue tail versus a yellow one as I had painted. Further research in the Monogram US Navy painting guide left me with the feeling that a yellow tail was a good possibility, so yellow it would stay.

Applying the decals finished up being an exercise in itself. On the whole the decals are fine. They are a little thick and require the use of a strong setting solution to get them to respond to the panel lines. But the real problem came when I discovered that a portion of my decal sheet lacked the release agent. The decals had been pretty much printed on to the paper. Blast! As it turned out the thickness of the decals were their saving grace as I was able to carefully float the decals free by using a paintbrush to slowly lift then from the paper backing. This seemed to have affected close to half the decals I need to use on this kit. No one else has reported this problem so it may have affected my kit only.

All up the decals were applied in 90 minutes.

Weathering and Varnish

Normally I don’t like to over weather my models so I applied a small amount of dark brown pastel chalk weathering to the flying surfaces, walkways, cockpit and engine exhaust areas. The model was then varnished using Testors Model Master Semi-Gloss varnish.

The last few jobs were to add the landing gear and a few detail parts to the cockpit. Again relying on other reviews I took the step of shortening the main landing gear by 3mm in length, this contributes to giving the aircraft its tail-low appearance. I also removed the top locating pin on the main gear used, I think, to help locate one the gear bay doors. This allows the gear door to be fit more easily.

Did I enjoy building this model? The answer is yes. But I have to say that Hobbycraft haven’t done themselves any favours by the number of simple and silly mistakes that I came across in this kit. Just fixing the instruction sheet and decal/marking issues would make life a bit easier.

Model, Images and Text Copyright © 2003 by Rob Woodbury
Page Created 13 November, 2003
Last Updated 17 March, 2004

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