1/32 Trumpeter P-38-L5

by Andy Lau

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Hi everybody, I'm Andy Lau from New Zealand. This is my 1st submission to ARC, a P38-L5 in 1/32 scale by Trumpeter. After more than a decade of break from this hobby, I came back again with this project, and this time quite seriously. During the long break, I always kept an eye on this field and saw what was happening out there, and I found that it has taken a large step forward, in terms of both the quality of the manufacturers' products and the modelers' modelling techniques.

This kit has excellent details, also, many useful PE parts are provided in the box. The cockpit is finely detailed with raised instruments and switches, as well as PE levers.  With only a few wires being added can dress it up to a super detailed one if one thinks additional parts are needed. I personally think that after-market parts are not necessary. The over all shape of the kit could be considered pretty accurate. It has more than 400 parts that classify it to be a very complicated one for above-average modelers. It was a professional kit preview article posted on HyperScale that gave a lot of positive comments to this kit that encouraged me to buy and build this kit. But in my construction, it gave me a partially different lesson.

I built it straight out of box, with the exception of the seat belts that I made of masking tape with the buckles came as PE parts with the kit (a nice feature). The down side of this kit is that big or small fit problems went through almost every step in the construction, especially when I joined the two engine booms to the wing, I spotted a big nasty gap on both side of each boom (hence totally 4 big seams), another major fit problem was when I constructed the gun compartment, it took me a lot of time to figure out what blocked the cowling of the gun bay went on to where it should.

I used Gunze silver for the NMF, weathered with artist oil paint. Kit decals are printed in Italy by Cartograph that are really in very high quality (an image below shows how well the decal gets down into the engraved panel lines and rivets), so I just couldn't afford to replace it with an after-market decal set.

Click on images below to see larger images

I spent a total of 130 hours in 25 days for the project, and it really bent me to my limit, for several times, I was put on the edge of giving up.

In summary, this is basically a good kit that will bring you a beautiful final outcome, despite that one has to mentally prepare himself for struggling with the fit problems before he starts up. I'm quite satisfied by the final result. Also, I'm enjoying the delux of being sent to work in China mainland, which will gave me the chance of purchasing this kit over there with a retail price as low as RMB290, which is US$35.

Hope you all like my model, questions and comments are welcome to zliu013@163.com

Happy modelling.

Andy

Click on images below to see larger images

Photos and text © by Andy Lau