Hasegawa 1/72 Republic P-47D Thunderbolt "Razorback"

HASEGAWA 1:72 REPUBLIC P-47D THUNDERBOLT "RAZORBACK"

Reviewer: Jon Hudak (rec.models.scale)
Kit Review submitted: 15 May 2006

Kit Details:

Kit # A7
Price: Several dollars at a model show, still available in the current catalog
Markings for three aircraft
Comments: An oldie but decent goodie

Aircraft History:

Though I could go on and provide a history, I think we're all pretty familiar with the P47 and there are quite a few reviews on this site that can provide you with that information. However I will point out a couple of interesting bits about the airplane and the particular pilot whose aircraft I decided to depict. The lineage of the P47 can be traced back to designers Alexander Seversky and Alexander Kartveli's previous two designs, the Seversky P35 and P43 Lancer which were both powered by radial air cooled engines. It is ironic that their next design, the XP-47A was a considerably smaller, lighter and more sleek airplane and was to be powered by an Allison V-1710 liquid cooled inline engine. The XP-47 and XP-47A prototypes were ordered in November of 1939 and January of 1940 but before work could begin on either type the U.S. Army issued a new set of specifications. This basically negated the project and replaced the two previous designs with the XP-47B request. Seversky's partner Alexander Kartveli changed his previous inline engine powered design and modeled the airframe around the new Pratt & Whitney 2,000 horsepower radial engine. This would give way to the new Pratt & Whitney powered XP-47B prototype and the P47 Thunderbolt which would eventually follow and the rest as they say is history. 78th Fighter Group and Quince Brown:

The 78th FG was the last of the P47 equipped Fighter Groups to form up in England in 1943. Also based in England were the 4th and 56th FGs and they would all play a vital role in wresting air superiority away from the Luftwaffe and change the tide of the war. The 78th FG first got their training back in the States in P38 Lightnings and would soon be training on P47s. Though opinions were somewhat mixed at first eventually the pilots would learn to adjust and welcome their new mounts. Famous P47 pilot and ace Hub Zemke would say "if you wanted to have your picture taken so you could send it back home to your girl, you sat in the cockpit of a P51 Mustang. If you wanted to survive in combat, you climbed into the cockpit of a P47 Thunderbolt." I think that pretty much sums it up and reflects on the ruggedness and ability of the P47 to absorb tremendous battle damage and still bring it's pilots back home. Quince Lucien "train busting" Brown was born December 7th 1916 in Hydrok Oklahoma in the U.S. hence the nickname of "Okie" that was applied on his P47. He joined the Army Reserves and later made the rank of 2nd Lieutenant and received his wings on April 25th 1941 while at Kelly Field Texas. He would serve as a flight instructor for 2 years and it was said much of his expertise came from the time served as an instructor. He was eventually assigned to the 84FS 78thFighter Group in Duxford England on April 21 1943. He scored his first victory on September 27th 1943 when he downed a Bf-109 just Northwest of Emden and would eventually score 12 kills consisting of Focke Wulf 190s and Bf-109s alike. I am not sure of his exact total as some sources quote 12 while others say 14. On September 6th 1944 he was shot down by flak while strafing Vogelsand airfield near Schleiden Germany. Sadly he was murdered by an SS officer or armed civilian shortly after being captured. I've read from a couple of different sources on this so that's why I mentioned both possibilities as to who shot and killed him. It has been said that by this stage of the war some civilians obviously outraged at all the loss and destruction would sometimes take the law into their own hands and shoot downed Allied pilots. An excellent pilot Quince Brown went long before his time was due and his tally of victories in such a short time is impressive. He also was the innovator of the strafing attack which the P47 made an excellent platform for and he also shot up more than a few trains hence his nickname of "Train Busting Quince Brown." Who knows how many more victories he could have added to his score had he not met such an unfortunate fate.

The Kit:

Hasegawa's Thunderbolt kits have been around a long time dating back to probably at least the early 1980s. For a kit of it's age the overall quality is very nice with recessed panel line detail and nicely molded parts which put it way ahead of some of its other competitors of the time like the Airfix and Matchbox kits. However it does have it's limitations, for one the cockpit detail is very sparse and the wheel wells are a little lacking as well. Also the kit propeller which represents the original thin bladed Curtiss Electric isn't very accurate and the engine isn't up to date on the level of detail with something comparable in more current kits. Another gripe (for some) and one that plagues most other P47 kits is that the machine gun blast tubes are mounted in line with the wing's leading edge instead of being parallel to the ground like they should be. Another concern are the wing pylons which lack some of the necessary detail like the bomb/fuel tank brackets and if you want to do a "clean" P47 with nothing under the wings you'll have to carefully remove these pylons which would require a bit of work.

Construction:

I started with the cockpit which is basically a one piece affair consisting of a seat molded together with a floor. This and the insides of the fuselage halves were painted with Tamiya XF-5 Flat Green which is a reasonably close match for the interior of all Republic built P47s. Also at this time the wheel wells and insides of the cowling and gear doors were painted with the same brand's XF-4 Flat Yellow. I must have been feeling a bit lazy at the time for I merely cut out and glued the decal for the instrument panel to the supplied half oval representation of the kit's part. Supplied as is, the decal would be much too large for the panel and you'd be better off cutting a new one from some styrene sheet. While my method worked and was quick and easy the end result looks rather unrealistic as you have a white instrument panel background with black print as opposed to a black panel with white gauges like on the real thing. Were I to build this kit again I would use a spare decal for this item from a Microscale P47 decal sheet that looks much more the part and cut a new backing panel of the general shape from styrene.

With the instrument panel glued in place the fuselage halves were cemented together and the whole assembly was set aside to dry. While I still had the glue out I assembled the wings next and for once here was something a little different than I was used to which is that the wings are separate entities and are not tied together in the normal 3 piece affair that is so prevalent in many other types of airplanes like Spitfires, Zeros, and 109s etc. It must have to do with the P47s layout as most kits of it I've seen are done in a similar way except for maybe the recent Italeri P47N kit. While I expected alignment issues with the separate wings, no problems were encountered (as a result of the rather long attachment tabs and mating slots) when it came time to glue them on. The stabilizers came next and all went well with these.

With the airframe nearing completion I set to work on the seams using mostly Gunze Mr. Surfacer as a filler. The fit of the kit is pretty good and I had no major traumas with the seams. I painted the engine with some flat black, later painting the crankcase cover with a medium gray and some dry brushing for the cylinders in steel. The engine was then glued into the cowling and this was later attached to the airframe shortly after I began painting. If it sounds like a simple build, it was and the whole kit went together pretty quickly in fact.

Colours & Marking:

In the box there are markings provided for three different airplanes which was a nice number of options for so long ago. First and the aircraft depicted on the box art is the popular "Little Chief" of the 61st FS/ 56th FG/ 8th AF flown by Lt. Frank W. Clibbe in Olive Drab over Neutral Gray. Number two is an overall natural metal version with colorful red striped tail of the 526 FS/86th FG/12 th AF in Italy depicting a farm animal (perhaps a donkey) riding down on a bomb. Number three is an RAF Thunderbolt Mk.1 of the "Ace Of Spades" Flight of No.73 OTU based in the Middle East in Dark Green and Ocean Gray over Medium Sea Gray.

Painting & Decaling:

I'd originally planned to do my P47 as an RAF bird so I painted the underside of it and the outer sides of the gear doors and wheel rims with Model Master Medium Sea Gray enamel paint. Then the model sat for well over a month due to an accident before I resumed progress on it this time opting to do a US scheme of Olive Drab over Neutral Gray. The reason for this was twofold, 1) it would be an easier scheme to do and 2) I had an upcoming event that I wanted to try and finish it for, see reason #1 again! :-) Since I already had the bottom painted I figured I'd just go with this color and was not too concerned if it wasn't dark enough to represent Neutral Gray. Before anymore painting could begin I still had to mask and and attach the canopy, this was done using mostly Tamiya masking tape and a piece of Bare Metal Foil for the complex shaped front windscreen panel.

Before attaching the canopy I cut some seat belts from masking tape painting them in two separate colors as evidenced in a reference book. In hindsight it's funny that I went to all the trouble to get the seat belts the right color but never installed a control column, d'oh. With the canopy now attached I could resume painting and before I did anything else I sprayed the forward end of the cowling and horizontal stripe on the tail with some Humbrol #34 Flat White. I will note that the cowling had popped off a couple of times and I finally got it to stay after scraping out as much of the hardened glue that was inside of it and starting over.

With the cowling now secure I masked off the forward part of it, the tail stripe and bottom of the airframe and proceeded to paint the upper surfaces with Olive Drab. Since I had already painted the bottom with enamel paints I wanted to use enamels for the rest of the model to keep things evened out. It was here that I would have some fits for while searching through my paints for some enamel Olive Drab I discovered my last remaining jar was about as moist as the Gobi Desert and the hobby shops were all long closed by this hour, sigh! While I had a couple of bottles of it in acrylics, like I said I wanted to stick with enamels only for the airplane itself. No problem as I knew or thought I had some Humbrol O.D. Green. Well, try as I might I couldn't not find it and since I was on a deadline I had to get it painted this night or else. I did stumble across a tinlet of their #86 Light Olive and after opening it and stirring it up I said "this will do!" Even though it wasn't as close to Olive Drab as I'd hoped it would be, I decided to go with it and use what I had.

Ironically the next day I discovered I had the desperately needed Humbrol O.D.Green all along, it was merely out of place on my shelf! With a deadline approaching fast and seeing that I already had the wrong color on the bottom anyway why not go for two out of three and leave the top color as is? Besides I liked the color of the Light Olive better anyway as it was a little brighter and more colorful than Olive Drab. With the model all painted I later sprayed on a coat of Pollyscale Clear Gloss acrylic in preparation for the decals and left it to dry in the meantime.

Decals & Markings:

Around this time I sprayed the propeller tips with Tamiya XF-3 Flat Yellow and XF-10 Flat Black for the blades, while the propeller boss and related parts were later painted with Model Master Chrome Silver by hand. I also brush painted the landing gear with some Humbrol Steel Metalcote and Pollyscale Nato Black for the tires. In the meantime I'd also assemled and went to work on the drop tanks giving them a base coat of light gray and a final coat of TS-30 Silverleaf from a Tamiya spray can. For the markings I decided to depict an airplane of Q. Brown from the 78FG in Europe using the excellent Sky Models P47 decal sheet. This was the first time using these decals and they performed admirably and went down nice with some Micro Set and a bit of their Sol when needed. I goofed the first time applying the "star and bar" on the upper port wing not realizing the aircraft I was depicting had the red surround as the decal instructions did not mention this. I had erroneously used the all blue one and luckily was able to fix this by simply applying the correct one with the red directly over top of it the next day, you can't even tell it was ever there in the first place. After the decals were on and dried I wiped the areas down with a damp cloth to remove any glue or setting solution remnants and gave the model another coat of Pollyscale Clear Gloss following it up with a Raw Umber water based wash using a product called The Detailer. This is a water based pre mixed product that's handy for doing washes and things and is available in different colors. While washes aren't exactly my favorite part of model building and are time consuming and tedious they do have a nice effect of breaking up what could be a monotonous color scheme and give a model a little more depth and detail. A final coat of Pollyscale Clear Flat was applied to finish things off and all that was needed now was to put on the landing gear and some other odds and ends. Final Assembly:

With the model nearing completion the landing gear doors were cut into three pieces and measured up with the struts so as to know where to glue the main gear doors together before attaching them to the aforementioned. All of the landing gear assemblies including the tail wheel were attached next along with the rest of the gear doors and all of the masking was pulled off the canopy. The machine gun blast tubes were painted with Humbrol Aluminum Metalcote and the propeller was simply pressed into place and the wing tip lights were painted with a base of Chrome Silver followed up by Tamiya clear green and red. To add a little more realism to the model I simply used a Micron .005 archival ink pen to "dot" the ends of the blast tubes which was certainly a lot easier than trying to drill them out or replace them with hypo tubing. I did have to use a piece of hypo tubing however for the pitot tube as the kit supplied one was broken off which is one of the problems you can run into when buying opened second hand kits. A piece of fine wire was inserted and used to make the tip and the tube was quickly painted with some more of the #86 Light Olive. One of the last things I did was to add the drop tanks to their pylons using Elmers white glue and with that the model was now finished.

Conclusions:

I didn't do any additional weathering to the model as I liked how it looked as it was. To me the Light Olive color gave it a fresher look than some of the more faded Olive Drab ones we are so used to seeing. The richness of the green reminded me of some of the color profiles you see in some of the books like the Osprey series. With this one I could say I'm representing a freshly supplied one and this is how it looked before it got all beat up. Later on I would discover much to my delight that the 78th FG's ground crews cleaned their P47s as much as possible, sometimes even waxing them to make them fly through the air a little faster and with less resistance. Not having enough reference material at the time of the build led me to not paint the matching white stripes on the stabilizers which should have been there. The Sky Models decal sheet did not show this so at the time I thought I was doing the right thing and only painted the tail stripe on, sigh. I'll probably just leave them off and take my losses. Despite this I was pretty happy with the end result and it took me back in time in a way as the last time I built this kit was nearly 20 years ago as a teenager. My friends all liked it and the fact that they all thought I had either replaced or drilled out the gun blast tubes was an added bonus. They couldn't believe how I did it when I told them and it was the easiest "conversion" I've ever done. Though the kit isn't without it's inaccuracies and lacks detail in some areas, overall it is still a pretty good model and one also has to consider the age of the kit as well. If you want to spruce it up a bit you could use the True Details resin cockpit which is specifically designed for this kit as well as their resin wheels which have a beautiful diamond tread pattern and are nicer than the kit wheels. If you're looking for a better Razorback, other ones are available that offer more detail and are more modern like the Academy and Tamiya kits, the latter of the two being the best and also most expensive. However for it's age the Hasegawa kit is still nice and if you're not an absolute stickler for detail it still builds into a nice little model.

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