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REVELL 1:72 REPUBLIC P-47D-30 THUNDERBOLT
Reviewer:
Kevin Ronayne
(Kevin.Ronayne@nuigalway.ie)
Kit Review submitted:
26 September 2002
The P-47 Thunderbolt is such a famous aircraft that there seems to be very little new to say about it, but I'm going to try anway. To begin with, it's worth mentioning that speculation over the true meaning of the 'Jug' nickname is apparently irrelevant, as it now seems that the name was not used during wartime! The same is true of the term 'Razorback', although that is still the most convenient term for describing the framed-canopy versions.
The Thunderbolt has always been in the shadow of the Mustang when it comes to the air war over Europe. However, the P-47 was the only single-engined USAAF fighter operating over Europe as an escort fighter until the introduction of the P-51B/C in late 1943. With the gradual introduction of larger drop tanks, the P-47 was able to fly into western Germany, to the consternation of the Reich defence forces. Despite it's enormous size, pilots learned how best to use the P-47 in combat, and scored some spectacular successes. For example, on September 6th 1943, P-47's surprised German fighter during a raid on Emden, and shot down 29 Bf 109G's and Fw 190's for the loss of just one Thunderbolt.
The gradual changeover of the P-47 to the ground attack role merely reflected the relative advantages of the P-47 and the Merlin-engined Mustang. Some units continued to operate the P-47 in the fighter role up until the end of the war in Europe. Given the length of time that the P-47 was employed as an escort fighter, it is hardly surprising that the top USAAF aces in the ETO - such as Francis Gabreski and Robert Johnson - were P-47 pilots.
In the ground attack role, the P-47 was an outstanding success, thanks to it's robust construction, air-cooled engine, and large weapons load. Although it could carry various types of unguided rockets, these were quite inaccurate for a precision strike on ground armour. Thus, pilots used their battery of 8 .5-inch machine guns, and were able to destroy even the largest German tanks by deflected fire off the ground onto the thin underside armour, or by attacking the upper engine covers and grilles (so that scene at the end of Saving Private Ryan wasn't complete nonsense after all). On one occasion during the Normandy breakout, P-47's of the 366th Fighter Group destroyed some 35 German tanks over two missions in the same day - a remarkable feat.
It has been said that the total of 12,602 P-47D units is the largest production total of a sub-type of any fighter in history. However, it should be noted that this total encompassed changes, both major (Razorback to bubble-top) and minor (new propellers and different factories) that led to designation changes in the Mustang. Let's not forget the estimated 14,000 Bf 109G's as well! The P-47D designation covered a lot of territory, and the exact sub-designation is important, as well as the factory - RE for the original Farmingdale plant in New York, and RA for the Evansville facility in Indiana. The degree to which changes and upgrades were retrospectively applied to earlier versions only makes matters more confusing, and any discussion of version specifics may require a lot of qualification.
Up until a few years ago, there was a really old 1/72 scale kit of the P-47 D 'Bubble Top' in the Revell catalogue. However, this is a new kit based on the superlative P-47 M tooling released in 1999. Why Revell chose to launch the new tooling with such a rare subject as the 'M' is something of a mystery - this subject, or a kit of the 'N' would have made more sense. So, three years later we finally have what is - for me at any rate - one of the most eagerly awaited new kits in years. It was well worth the wait.
The two 'M' kits. The first cover is the original kit from 1999. The second is the reissued kit (in a larger box) which was released just before the 'D' kit, and sports different markings - and a more extensive decal sheet.
As is normal for a genuine Revell tooling, the price is amazingly cheap - just STG £3.50, or 6 Euro here in Ireland. The box is the normal one-piece design, but it is at least slightly bigger than that used a few years ago. With the smaller box, there was a real chance of parts being broken with a bulky tooling such as this. The kit contains 53 parts in total, consisting of three main sprues and one subsidiary sprue (moulded in silver-grey plastic), plus a small enclosed transparency sprue. Everything is in a sealed plastic bag, although a separate bag for the transparency would have been nice. The instructions are on a 12-page loose-leaf booklet, which is slightly larger than A5 size. Curiously, there is hardly any background information provided in the instructions, although that's no loss for such a famous subject as this. The instruction sheet is generally excellent, with just the odd issue surfacing here and there during construction. One irritant is the continued insistence on Revell paint codes, with little or no effort to cross-reference these with other paint manufacturers or (more importantly) relevant paint standards.
Physically, the differences in this kit from the 'M' version are confined to the small subsidiary sprue. The differences relate to the external stores, and the different engine reduction gear-casing unit - the 'M' and 'N' used a newer engine with this visible change. The stores supplied with this new kit are a pair of 500-pound bombs, a pair of 75 US Gal. (284 litre) drop tanks, and a larger 'flat' belly tank used only on the P-47. There was a very wide range of drop tanks used on the P-47, but I'm fairly certain that this is the standard 150 US Gal. (568 litre) unit.
Now this is a curious one! This is a picture from the first 'M' kit instruction leaflet, released in 1999. The 'M' kits provided two large streamlined drop tanks and 10 x 5-inch HVAR's, which were probably not even used on the 'M'. These are nowhere to be seen here, as the kit has the underwing and centreline drop tanks provided only with the new 'D' version several years later! Weird. Note the gun barrels forming a line almost parallel to the ground, which is correct.
There are two subject options:
I chose to build the USAAF version, although it goes without saying that this kit will be built several more times!
The -28 and -30 were pretty much identical externally, however, the D-30 was subject to at least two prominent retrofitted adjustments. The first was the dorsal strake, which is provided in the kit. Some -30's were also retrofitted with the zero-length stubs for the 5-inch HVARS. Since the new 'D' kit still has the drill-out holes in the lower wings for the rockets (mistakenly intended for the 'M' version), it is possible to build a fully loaded 'D' kit using the spare rockets from an 'M' kit. As I discovered later on, it wasn't quite that simple.
The final part of the kit is the decal sheet, and it is one of the very best productions that I have ever seen. The amount of stencilling provided for a subject such as this is amazing, and the quality of the decals is excellent, as we have come to expect from Revell.
The first 'M' kit that I bought a few years ago took me by a little bit by surprise. Although I'd seen enough of Revell's new toolings by then, the quality and precision of the mould were still something to behold, with superb engraved detail and countersunk riveting. The newer kits (both 'M' and 'D') provided more evidence that over the past couple of years there has been a very small but discernable drop in the quality of mould pressings. This is possibly due to a relocation of the production facilities from Germany to Poland - if what I read elsewhere is correct. In practical terms, the mould now exhibits small but prominent amounts of flash, as well as extremely slight imperfections in the panel detail engraving. I must emphasise that these are very small faults - the flash is easily and quickly removed, and there is nothing in the way of mould misalignment. There is a small amount of mould seam to be removed, but this tends to be the case with even the very best of kits. One potential problem area was the quality of the transparency - a major problem with later production runs of the Me 262 kit. Thankfully, that is not an issue here.
Cockpit construction was conventional and very easy, due to the superb engineering - something that was true for just about every part of the kit. Features of the cockpit include an accurate 'bucket' seat with seatbelts moulded in place, a control stick with a control run that passes underneath the seat, detailed cockpit floor and sidewalls, and an excellent relief-detailed instrument panel with the foot pedals included in the same part. The alignment pins on the pedals didn't quite fit to the holes on the cockpit floor, so I cut them off - there were plates on each halve of the fuselage where the panel could be attached more securely and accurately anyway. There was an instrument panel decal supplied with the first 'M' kit, but this has been dropped for the later kits. I preferred this approach, but it meant a good amount of time was expended picking out the outlines of the dials.
For both 'M' kits, the Revell paint guide seems to call for interior green for the cockpit and engine cowling, and yellow chromate primer for the main wheel bays and undercarriage cover interiors. This kit specifies two different shades of green, but I opted to go for the yellow/green combination - there are more than enough wartime colour photographs showing yellow wheel bays. I used Humbrol 81 for the yellow chromate primer, and the discontinued Hu 151 for interior green.
The fuselage halves joined together with no problem whatsoever, but adding the canopy was a bit of a problem. As can be seen from the instruction scan below, Revell have opted for a construction that allows the 'bubble' canopy to slide back and forth. I have also seen this in the Fujimi F7U Cutlass and Revell/Monogram F-82 Twin Mustang kits. In practice, the fit for the key part (#31) was too tight, and I decided to cut off the lower section and just use the visible part which attached to the interior of the canopy. The interior framing of both the canopy and windscreen was painted in Humbrol MetalCote Aluminium. The exterior was painted red - matt, not gloss, which is what I had assumed until I looked up my conversion charts.
Despite looking complicated, the engine block and firewall assembly was very easy. I did have to clean away some mould seam on all the cylinders, but I can't yet remember a radial engine block where I didn't have to do this to some degree. The painting guide for the engine would only have been appropriate for a factory-fresh unit, so I painted it mostly in MetalCote steel. Once the entire block (including the propeller retaining rod) was in place, the cowling was then simply placed over it. There was a separate part for the supercharger intake, which fitted into the bottom of the one-piece cowling. The intake was the one part that required significant cleaning up, but once this was done, the fit was perfect. The cowl flaps are moulded in an open position, which I think is extremely realistic - most photos of P-47's show the flaps open just like this.
The wings are superb in almost every respect. The main wheel bays have the correct 'boxed in' shape, with the bay walls not following the outline of the door covers. Also, the roof detail is moulded into the underside of the upper wings, which means that the bays have the correct depth. In these details, the Revell tooling represents a major advance over the Academy kits, which are seriously deficient in these areas. The wings have alignment spars that are designed to fit into the fuselage so that the wings are at the correct angle - note that the P-47 wings have a lot of dihedral. In reality, there was a small amount of 'give' in the fit, so it required a bit of attention to ensure a correct and symmetrical fit.
The main undercarriage legs are designed to fit into a semi-circular socket with the perfect fit ensuring that the legs are set at the correct angle. The wheel detail looks crisp and accurate, but the tyres lack the full amount of crosshatched detail that is evident in photos. Each wing had a one-piece wheel/leg cover - for a 'wheels-up' model - that had to be cut in three for a model with lowered undercarriage, which is what I was building. In the Academy kits the parts design is such that a model with retracted undercarriage couldn't be built without some surgery or scratch building! The only alteration I had to make here was to cut down part of the mounting plates on the main undercarriage legs. This was to allow the upper leg cover to lie right up against the main wheel cover, rather than be angled out and away from it. One final point about the wings relates to the positioning of the gun barrels. The gun barrels were not positioned along the leading edge (a common mistake in P-47 kits), but were arranged in a staggered manner which meant that they formed a line almost parallel with the ground. This layout was designed to accommodate the ammunition feeds, and Revell's correct reproduction is another major plus point for the kit.
At the back of the aircraft, the tail plane/elevator units were good fits. Different one-piece units are provided for the tail wheel bay/doors, depending on whether the undercarriage is to be up or down. The wheels down unit includes doors moulded at the correct shallow angle - it's probably a good idea to apply the small stencil decals to these doors before attaching the unit to the fuselage. Next was the dorsal strake, which could do with a small bit of sanding down where it fits over the leading edge of the fin - in this scale, it's hard to achieve a 'flush' effect in a join such as this without some intervention by the modeller. Finally, the small intercooler exhaust doors are provided as separate parts, and you have some discretion in how to position them, in terms of being open or closed.
Apart from a couple of aerials and pitot tubes, the last major part of the main aircraft was the propeller, which simply fits onto the end of the retaining rod ('rod' is the correct term, as it's very long, going right through the engine block). The single-part propeller unit looks to be an excellent representation of the Curtiss Electric C-452S airscrew used from the D-28 onwards. Note that the 'M' and 'N' variants used a different propeller, but the airscrew unit was essentially the same, so Revell are correct in using the same propeller here as used in the 'M' kits.
For the external stores, I used a 75 US Gal. drop tank on the centreline, and a 500-pound bomb on each wing pylon. I attached each (very detailed) pylon to the reverse wing than the one specified in the instructions, as dry fitting seemed to show this offered a better fit. Although the instructions don't show it, the pylons should be aligned perpendicular to the ground, and not to the wing under surface. The bombs were attached with the fins at a 90-degree angle. I assumed this was wrong until I came across a photo that showed 500-pounders fitted in just this way. The weight of the bombs was confirmed by some extremely crisp stencilling. The bombs (and the upper fuselage area) were painted in the very dark green/grey Humbrol 66, which is often quoted as the best match for WW II Olive Drab. Of course, Olive Drab is a hugely complicated area, and just about anything is possible. I made my decision based on the weight of evidence from photos and plates of similarly painted P-47's.
© Kevin Ronayne 2005
I had originally intended to hang a load of HVARS under the wings as well. Such a large weapon load was used in practice, albeit with a reduced ammunition load. Since the zero-length rocket stubs were a retrofit to the D-30, I had no guarantee that the subject aircraft was so modified, but I decided to do it anyway. Obviously, this meant that I had to drill out the rocket stub holes before cementing the wing halves together. Before I assembled the rockets, I had to resolve the bizarre instructions (from the 'M' kits naturally, as the rockets came from there). I decided to the obvious - turn each tail unit around and 'plug' the main rocket body into it. Problem solved - or so I thought. I realised that things were just not going to work when I started dry-fitting the rockets. Under each wing, there would have been three rockets outboard of the main pylon, and two inboard. Try as I might, I couldn't see any way that I could attach the rockets located just inboard of the pylons - the pylons just kept getting in the way. Since I was convinced the angle of the main pylons was right, I can only assume that there was something wrong in the positioning of the rockets. There was nothing left to do except fill in the holes on the wings - a bit tricky, since some of them were right on panel lines. I'll try and attempt the rocket installation again the next time I build the kit.
The wrong way (from the instructions) and the right way (from the artwork) to produce a 5-inch HVAR - both from the same kit!
This was very straightforward, with Humbrol MetalCote Aluminium being used (without any polish applied) for the natural metal effect. As stated already, Humbrol 66 Olive drab was used for the upper fuselage area. I used plain matt red (Hu 19) for the canopy framing, spinner, dorsal strake and engine cowling band. The artwork shows the wingtips also painted red, but I think this is wrong - it's not in the instructions, and I can't recall ever seeing a P-47 marked in this way in any of the references. The instructions indicated that some of the fuselage on the port side around the bull emblem should be painted white, but it wasn't really evident from the artwork. In this case, I followed the artwork.
This is one of the highlights of the kit. Not only are the decals of the highest quality, but also there is a serious amount of detail included in terms of stencilling and other items. If you choose the painted French version, there is much less to apply - although still a lot compared to many other kits. Due to the sheer amount of stencilling, it is not surprising that a few errors have apparently crept into the instructions. A couple of decals are mistakenly listed for use twice, which is due to mistaken numbering on the instruction leaflet. A handful of decals on the sheet are not required at all for either version, as far as I can see. There are only a couple of detail views provided in the paint/decal guide, but I still had little difficulty in deciding the exact position (and orientation!) of every item. On the cover artwork, the bull emblem is all black, but the actual decals (and the instructions) have it in two colours. The red wing root decals (with the 'no step' markings) are not large enough by my reckoning. There are a couple of other minor niggles in the paint/decal guide, such as the drop tanks being of the wrong type ('M' style tanks), or the underwing insignia being shown on the port side. This seems to me to be a mistake, even though one sometimes sees plates showing this. Frankly, I doubt that anyone will be caught out by the last one - most people won't even notice it. Finally, although the fuselage insignia are each provided in two parts, I still had to cut each smaller part in two to fit over the intercooler exhaust doors and exhausts themselves.
Well, it looks like the real McCoy to me. Doubtless some people with access to much more information than me will find fault with it somewhere, but it looks just about perfect to me. It might seem a few inches too long compared to quoted dimensions, but everything looks correct and in proportion when compared with a side-view plate that is obviously 1/72 scale. It may be that the dorsal strake is three inches (1 mm in scale) too long, but it's hard really to find any major problems with this kit.
© Kevin Ronayne 2005
Addedndum (September 2005): Not long after I published this review, I got an interesting email from Slovenian modeller Josip Žagar. He had this to say on P-47's in the (former) Yugoslavian air force:
"Our former air force received around 60 P-47D-30s around 1952 and used them ‘till the end of 60s. I happen to know of 2 preserved examples,one in Belgrade’s Batajnica museum (natural metal&more complete) and one in Zagreb’s technical museum which is a little less complete and wears an interesting cammo finish."
Anyway I happen to see the Zagreb example and found out that Revell kit tyres are correct for postwar Jugs."
Josip went on mention a P-47 walkaround gallery that was on a web site hosted under the the kithobbyist.com base site. Unfortunately, the kithobbyist site went under a couple of years ago, so there is no point publishing the reference. Hopefully, some or all of the resources that were under the kithobbyist umbrella have resurfaced (or will resurface) elsewhere, but it's a lot of work just to track them down.
I am, of course, absurdly late in posting this addendum - Josip's email got overlooked in a very full inbox, but I remembered it when I was updating this review, and was able to find it in my archives. If you think three years is late, I should point out that Neil Young once took 16 years before finally crediting some other musicians who worked on an early album of his. And of course the Vatican took over 350 years to finally officially acknowledge that Galileo was right ...
A Tamiya quality kit for an Italeri (or even an Airfix!) price? It certainly looks like it! How Revell can afford to produce and sell a kit of this quality at such a price is beyond me. They are probably banking on this tooling selling by the truckload, as it deserves to. I already have four kits (two 'M', two 'D'), and I assume Revell will eventually tool the new wings for an 'N' version, which would also be a huge seller. Before that though, I suspect that they will release a second 'D' kit with alternative markings. This is unquestionably the best P-47 kit in this scale - it's a clear winner over the Academy kits, and the Hasegawa tooling (which I have seen but not built) is a very long way behind. This kit is probably the equal of anything else that Revell have produced recently, and that includes the Heinkel He 177.
Apart from some standard texts, my main information came from two sources:
Related Reviews:-
Revell 1/72 P-47M Thunderbolt [revised 99' tooling]
Related INBOX Reviews:-
Revell 1/72 P-47M Thunderbolt [revised 99' tooling]
Revell 1/72 P-47M Thunderbolt ['99 tooling]
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