Eduard 1/48 scale P-400 "Cactus Airforce" | Full Build

greetings everyone Brett here with Hammerhead model making and on this episode we're going to be looking at the Edward P400 proy pack in 148 scale I've had this kid in my stash for quite a while and it's always one that I'd really wanted to get to but other projects just kep coming up and kind of pushing this one out of the build cycle and so late in 2023 I finally just decided you know what I'm just going to sit down and build this kit and I ended up actually building it relatively quickly uh over about a 2 and a half 3 week period um and I didn't post any work in progress pictures on my social media I just I just built this one and filmed it like kind of one of those like I'm just doing this one for me and I had an absolute blast I mean this kit was just so much fun to work on it's one of Edward's older um offerings so it's it's definitely not you know their most advanced kit but nevertheless it was still a fun and enjoyable kit and I wanted to do this one is one of the cactus Air Force aircraft and if you're not familiar with the cactus Air Force I highly recommend you go and research it because it's quite interesting but the the short story is basically after the Allies the Americans took guad canal in the Pacific the the US Army Air Force and the US Marines and I believe the Navy as well but I'm not 100% certain on that stationed some aircraft at Henderson field on gu Canal um but because of the Relentless attacks from the Imperial Japanese Navy it was very difficult for them to get resupplies and spare parts and things and so the aircraft they had on there which was quite a collection of aircraft really struggled to stay maintained and airworthy and so one of the aircraft types that the US Army aircore US Army Air Force had there was the P400 now if you're not familiar with the P400 it is actually the export version of the P39 and what made an export version is that it had a 20 mm cannon in the nose instead of the the 37 mm Cannon and it had different gun types in the wings I believe they were 303s for because this these particular aircraft were intended for British use um but after the breakout of the war the US kind of requisitioned these aircraft and press them into US Army Air Force service and so what's interesting about this aircraft well this one in particular is it actually has a British camouflage pattern painted on it but during the course of the cactus Air Force's time on guadal Canal many of the aircraft were either damaged shot up you know or or broke down during normal use and because they lacked a lot of the spare parts and resources that they needed they would often resort to cannibalizing semi-broken aircraft to maintain flyable aircraft and I think of the initial 20 p400s that they had there it they only ended up with like six that were serviceable and flying within a very short period of time and this aircraft in particular is is unique even amongst the other unique P40 p400s that were there in that they had a mostly intact airframe it just needed to a a wing replacement and so they replaced the wing of this P400 with an with a already pretty damaged P39 and so what ends up happening is they had two different uh paint jobs uh so the the majority of the aircraft is painted in the normal British two-tone you know Dark Earth dark green camo but then the wing that they took off of the P39 was more of your standard un Army Air Force uh olive drab over neutral gray and so seeing that and then reading about this particular aircraft and realizing just how hobbled together it was from spare parts I knew that I really wanted to make this aircraft so um what you've been watching here is just kind of the general uh you know the normal goings of putting together the cockpit painting it and detailing it and whatnot the Edward kit does provide photo etge for the interior both uh pre-colored and non-colored photo etch the uh and it's it's pretty pretty nice too I I mean the uh the overall detail is pretty good out of the box but the inclusion of the photo Edge just really takes up that next Notch overall fits pretty good I actually did have a slight alignment issue with the the way that the back part of the cockpit fits together and even though it's not ter terribly noticeable once you do see it um it you it is you will notice it uh but basically the the the bulkhead that sits right behind the pilot seat is angled back just a little bit too far it should be standing up just a little bit more I didn't catch that in my test fit that one's on me but I mean in the end it doesn't change a lot in terms of like the fit of the model but if if you are a fan of the P400 P39 it would be somewhat noticeable now this aircraft is unconventional in that the engine sits in the center of the aircraft and not in the nose like most other single engine fighters of the time and as such it actually sits on a tricycle landing gear so it has the main landing gear on the wings and a nose wheel and what this means is you have to be really careful to make sure that this aircraft is not a tail sitting aircraft uh and so to that end you can see me adding a lot of fishing weight here and in the end it I I was I had enough nose weight in there to make it not a tail sitter but only just I mean if you if you give this thing a stern look it will it will lean over backwards if it's on a slight incline it will lean over backwards if if you're on a perfectly flatten level surface it'll sit on all of its landing gear and uh but so I I barely squitch by on that one but I mean there there are there is room to add more weight I just didn't have the foresight to to actually add more weight I should have but would have guaranteed to be much more of a much more balanced but I got there in the end the uh you do get some nice detail on the in the wings here uh both in terms of guns wheel wells but also the um the air intakes there for the engine the oil coolers and the radiator so um that's quite nice you do get a lot of nice panels the clear parts fit really well um and are quite detailed in terms of like the framing and the the rivet detail on the clear Parts the doors on the other hand had issues trying to get them to fit and in the end I only got one of them to fit well the other one was kind of press fit and ultimately I decided to have it open but just be aware that you do really have to do some trimming and and filing to get the doors to fit properly um you saw those photoed screens going in there for the intakes it's quite a nice detail because they are quite prominent and top and bottom halves of the Wings going together that it's interesting the P39 P400 has very thick wings especially at the wing route and a very blunt leading you know Leading Edge and uh so I just found that of note to be interesting overall the con the the fit of the aircraft was really nice the two fuse slge has fit together really well I it required very little filling um to remove the seam lines so it's it's definitely a low effort when it comes to that the wing roots on the other hand did require some some work to get this the proper dihedral set to the wings and to get those that that Wing root Gap to to fill up but we did get there eventually did require a little bit of plastic filler but nothing that wasn't insurmountable another nice thing about the propy pack is you do get Edward pre-cut masks which are pretty essential on this is it has a lot of clear parts that need that need um masking but what is nice is they do provide you masking for both the outside and the inside of the doors because the door both both doors can be positioned in the open position and there's a lot of detail on the inside of the clear part that is the that makes up the door it's nice that they actually provide internal masks for for the door windows so uh you know def definite props to Edward for that here's some more detail going into the outlets for the radiator and oil coolers you do have the option of using photoed Parts there but I don't I didn't find that they added really any additional detail over what the kit part the kit plastic offered so I just opted for the plastic part there now before we get into the bulk of the painting I do want to spray the inside of all the clear Parts with the interior color uh just because the the interior the glass is pretty open and you will be able to see a lot of this uh it was important to make sure that the correct color would be showing so by spraying the interior color first and then we can go over with our primers and the rest of our paint um it'll all work out I also did a little bit of SP checking on my seams there just to make sure there was no ghost seams that I was missing now for the paint job I'm going to be using two sets of paints for the the British job uh the British paint job I'll be using Vallejo and for the US you know the standard olive drab I will be using ammo Mig so here we are spraying the uh underside of the British side of the camo so this is the I believe this is the sky green color from the Vallejo set going on I opted not to do any pre-shading with this and really to concentrate on doing post shading and oils for all of my weathering work but my intention was to make this a really beat up used dirty aircraft um but I just figured with all the different uh camo patterns going here all the masking I would be doing it would just be easier to to do all of my fading and stuff you know as post shading as opposed to pre-shading the aircraft so while I have the color in the paint just making sure to get some of the uh uh landing gear door covers so now we're going to move on to the medium gray this is going to be the underside of the US Army Air Force side um now normally this would be this should be a neutral gray but I found the the the neutral gray that I had was just a little too dark for for how like how I thought it should look totally possible that it's that's pretty that's accurate but to my eye it just didn't quite look right so I opted for this gray instead um which I think had a much has a much better look and again that's just my opinion it's not a fact or it's not like you know supported by photographic evidence just what I think looks good um you'll find that a lot of the stuff I do is based on just what I think looks good I do try to maintain somewhat historical um colors and whatnot but ultimately in the end I will generally prioritize an artistic approach over a purely you know 100% factual approach so now for the upper side we're going to start with our dark brown or a dark Earth and initially I went it on really light just to make sure I had good coverage and then eventually I go back in with a much heavier um spray to really like kind of lay down as nice solid color here and the uh I am thinning the Vallejo paints with the um uh x20a thinner from Tamia I feel that I always I've had great success with this um and it thins the Vallejo paints really nicely you you it is possible to over thin it and it just kind of comes out as you know like milky water but if you get the mixture just right it does spray beautifully and you can get a lot of control out of your airbrush with the paint so now I added a little bit of a kind of a yellow ish tan to the uh Flat Earth color and here I'm just going through and adding patches of fading to the overall paint job really concentrating on the upper surfaces but also you know along panels and control surfaces and things like that just to help break up the the overall body of this color um and yes I will be adding another camouflage color to this which will also help break it up but again these aircraft being operated in extremely harsh conditions in the South Pacific you know with zero cover uh or maintenance facilities so weathering was definitely something that happened to these aircraft now so now we're going to go through with the dark green color and I have masked over the parts that I don't want to spray with blue tack that's the blue stuff you see on there it's also known as poster tack or poster putty but it's essentially something that you you purchase to hang up posters on your wall uh I I am able to get this uh from my local dollar store for 99 cents a pack so I usually go in and buy a couple packs but the nice thing about the blue tack is it is somewhat reusable so even after this I will um I can use it multiple times if you just mix it all back together knead it together whatever paint you get on it kind of just ends up blending into it and you can reuse it multiple times I probably uh would get rid of a batch of blue Tac once every few months or once every few paint jobs before moving on to a new Fresh Pack but so I also did a little bit of post fading on the green as well just so that it would um look uh Blended in with the rest of the camo there but so you can see taking off the blue tack here how nicely that came turned out and this is definitely um a process that I'm getting more and more used to where uh I try to think of the weathering process as an extension of the painting process uh and what I mean by that is you can begin the weathering process while you're painting the aircraft you don't necessarily have to think of it as a fully separate thing so that's that's why I've got like the paint fading that is a type of weathering done in the paint process but I can also enhance or modify or you know pull back a little bit or during the actual weathering process whether I'm using enamels oils acrylics whatever so now we're spraying on the olive drab onto the left wing so this is the wing that was replaced by a P39 Wing so it has the different paint job um but also making sure that I I do some fading here just because the P39 that were there were also were there for a while and obviously the P39 that this Wing was donated from was pretty beat up so because it was damaged uh there was also a number of panels that are called out in the paint instructions in the kit that were supposed to be OD panels that were pulled off of other aircraft to replace panels that were on the P400 so unfortunately the the olive drab kind of Blends in with the other colors but it will become a little bit more noticeable when I actually do start doing some weathers but there we go so that is all of the camouflage done on the aircraft and really kind of liking the just the patch together look on this um when looking at reference pictures of the cactus Air Force p-39s I noticed on a lot of the or sorry the p400s that the wing tips were painted white on the aircraft that had the British camo on it but not on the aircraft that had the OD camo on it so I even though the instructions don't call it out I I took it upon myself to paint the white wing tip on the right wing but not on the left wing and again I really like the asymmetrical look so quite fun there is a little bit of question over what the actual color of the spinner was on this aircraft uh there are some sources that say it was white and there is photographic evidence that some of the other aircraft had white Spinners but there is also some evidence that it could have been red I opted for the red just to add that extra little splash of color in there um just a red spinner always kind of looks good uh you know find an airplane that does that has a red spinner that doesn't look good so uh while the actual main body was the aircraft was drying I painted the the uh propellers and the propeller tips using some uh Outlaw paints from Australia they're great paints I highly recommend them also decided to paint the no slip areas of the Wings again because there's coming off of two different aircraft they actually had two different patterns of how the no slip you know the non-slip texture was applied so that's why you have two different uh looks to this and it just that makes makes me happy again like all the asymmetrical items on this aircraft that just really adds to it so now before we move into the next phase which is going to be decals uh got to make sure we get everything nice and secured underneath a layer of varnish for this I'm using a gloss varnish the alad aqua gloss and this will just help seal in all of the paintwork that we've done up to this point and protected from all the subsequent sorry subsequent um things that we're going to be doing to the model later on uh typically when I do the gloss coat I will do it in two like kind of medium coats uh and that's usually good to get to get it on there uh so the decals so this is an older boxing so this doesn't have the uh the new Edward decals and these older ones I believe they were printed by cograph I could be wrong but they were great and they performed flawlessly zero issues with them uh and even though they had quite extensive carrier film on some of these decals especially these big US Army decals once I got some solva set on there they just they disappeared you would never be able to see them um and fortunately there weren't a ton of decals on this kit especially not a lot of like stencil decal uh so mainly was just kind of the larger marking so the decaling process didn't really take very long and uh just make sure you getting all the air bubbles out and all the excess water off um and then as far as my decal setting solution I do like to use walther's solv a set it's it's pretty strong but I I usually don't have much issue with it so going around making sure I get all of the decals covered in the solva set so that they will conform down to all the nice surface details so this aircraft was known as white 13 hence the 13 on the nose but it was also christened the resurrection after they had uh grafted the new Wing onto it you know signifying its rebirth its Resurrection to active use and I just I find those types of little details quite fascinating um so now we're getting into the bulk of the weathering so we're starting off with a panel wash I'm using the Flory dark dirt wash here um applying it liberally all over the aircraft and really just kind of making sure that I'm getting it into all of the panel lines the rivets and Fastener detail there is quite a lot on this aircraft so um it really lends itself well to a wash you will notice on that on that side of the engine that's got like that weird like red and white design so what that's supposed to be is some of the cactus Air Force p400s had a a quite striking sharkmouth design on it this particular aircraft didn't but that panel that was there was replaced from an aircraft that had the shark mouth on it so what you're seeing is actually the back the very back end of the shark mouth that was painted onto another aircraft that the panel was then grafted onto this aircraft so again just another reason why I like I was really excited to do this aircraft just because of the total Patchwork that it became so with the panel washed down and cleaned up I'm moving on to a kind of a matte SL satin coat and again so this is another varnish layer that will help protect our sealing our decals and protect them but also provide a nice foundation for doing oil paints I definitely prefer to do my oil paints over a gloss or a A semigloss or a matte surface it just helps them bite in a little bit more and and blend in a little bit easier than it would on a on a glossy surface I know many people have different preferences preferences and that's fine uh definitely do what works for you this is just what works for me and at this point I know already that I'm done doing any kind of like overspraying or varnishing on the aircraft so at this point I usually try to um remove all the canopy masks just so I can check to see if there's any overspray on the inside clear Parts things like that um and there was a little bit of over spray that somehow managed to get into the back part of the canopy not a whole lot I could do to to get rid of that but um not terrible so now I'm just doing a little bit of sponge chipping so I'm just using a steel color here uh concentrating the chipping more so on the inboard portion of the Wings as opposed to the outboard because that's where the propeller would be kicking back uh dirt debris rocks off the Airfield they were taking off of you know unimproved airfields so and now with with a fine tip brush we're going to go in and do more targeted localized chipping concentrating on panels around like for example here the access to the guns and the uh the gun ammunition where ground crew would be servicing these aircraft Non-Stop and constantly taking Fasteners on and off the panels would be dos around things like that so that's kind of the the logic of where I'm trying to uh apply my chipping along the wing route here this is where the pilot or the ground crew would be um getting onto the wing servicing the engine that sits right behind the cockpit there so you'd have a lot of people up there kneeling on there their boots on there if they have rocks in their boots it's going to scratch the paint or they drop a tool it's going to scratch the paint so now we can move on to oils for this I'm going to be using black um a umbre like a raw umbre color and then white so I start off by flooding a small area of the aircraft with mineral spirits and then I can start applying the oil paint directly to the areas that I want to weather so here for example I'm applying it to these engine panels here and I'm applying black and pretty heavily too I again I'm going for a very weathered look here um and so I'm applying it direct the paint directly to to the model but then what I will do is come back in with a brush this larger brush here that's that has thinner on it and I will start blending in that oil paint and it will lessen the effect of the oil paint by blending it in um but what is nice about oil paint is that you can build up the layers and so it helps you to kind of really build up the opacity of what you're doing so if you really want to go heavy you can add lots of layers of oil paint and and what's nice too is you can you can vary different colors and shades and tones in there and really create some cool Variety in your in your oil paints if you want to hold it back a little bit and just you know just want the uh the hint of weathering you can certainly do that and just apply one layer or something but again so we're going to go in adding layer upon layer and I'm and I really on this kit decided to concentrate like on a panel by panel basis and and and I kind of made the determination earlier on that I wanted the OD portions to be more weathered than the camo portions so that's why I was really concentrating on those certain panels because those are panels that came off of an OD colored aircraft and so I just I it was really fun to be kind of play with a narrative in my head that like oh yeah the the the engine panels that this that donated you know or the the aircraft that donated these engine panels was really dirty and really busted up but the panels were still serviceable so that's why they slapped them on there um but that's not to say that I didn't weather the other parts just I really kind of tried to emphasize the OD Parts more so here we're working on the wing so the wing is going to collect Grime and dirt and stuff just from the ground Crews being up there servicing it um Additionally you know the weather is going to cause uh fading and surface FL situations um if there if it's stormy windy stuff's going to be throwing around you know if it's sitting out on a hot Dusty Airfield and an airplane's coming by it's going to be kicking up stuff and throwing it at the like there's just so many different things that can cause wear and damage to an aircraft that it it creates a lot of opportunity to do some fun weathering and the other thing that I was really trying to concentrate on this one was to to to Really make it look weathered and beat up without making it like super heavy-handed and I think I got pretty close so here's here's all the oil paint dried on the upper surface and again I'm just I'm quite pleased with the overall look that I got out of this and the the direction that it was headed so now we can start concentrating the underside so here I'm going to be using much more brown colors and my reasoning behind this is that the underside is going to be getting a lot more just dirt as opposed to like Grime and grease it's just going to be picking up a lot more dirt so I'm just using more brown colors more Earth Tone colors here just trying to really concentrate around where the propeller would be you know the prop wash would be blowing stuff back but also like where the wheels might be kicking up mud and dust like here for example uh you know dirt and mud are going to get splattered back on the underside of the wing as it's as it's traveling across the ground things like that um so that was kind of my thinking here as to how I was going to do do this and got the insides of the wheel wells pretty dirtied up as well and um dirt concentrated along the fuselage here this is just going to give it an overall dirty appearance and um yeah it's pretty straightforward I'm using those same processes that I Ed on the upper surface but so now we're going to switch to using some acrylics in the airbrush for a little while and this is going to kind of help get us get all of the uh airflow related stuff so I'm here I'm just using a little bit of straight black just to kind of show a little bit of um stuff coming out of the oil cooler and radiator Outlets I know these areas wouldn't necess like they're not like it's not coughing out exhaust for example that would be just really syy but there would be imperfections in the systems that would cause stuff to come out of there if there was um an engine fire for example that had the potential of having stuff exit out there so that's kind of what I was going for and then here like I mentioned before I wanted to show the OD portion of the aircraft as being more heavily weathered so I quickly masked off just the OD portion of the right wing and just added a little bit more you know ex not exhaust it's not exhaust but more staining there and again I cannot necessarily confirm this 100% accurate but um it does make it look quite Dynamic to having the exhaust coming out of those vents and now we can do the real exhaust so the the uh the the really look I wanted to go here for was you know that that Sy look but also like the bleaching from the high high octane fuel that you often see on these types of aircraft especially in the Pacific p38s are a great example of this type of exhaust weathering so we're starting off with a pure black and this is really heavily thinned and I'm spraying it a relatively low pressure so that I can slowly build up the op opacity here and I'm constantly checking back and forth to make sure that I'm kind of getting it somewhat symmetrical and then just doing a little bit of uh staining for the guns as well but uh yeah Norm I used to do this type of um weathering with with oils but I've become much more comfortable with the airbrush and and now I enjoy doing it with the airbrush much more so here's that that high octane staining that I was telling about so this is just using a light gray color over the black that we've already done and kind of applying it in kind of like a splotchy erratic not necessar a nice smooth airflow back a lot of times you would see this kind of splotchy effect on engine exhaust like that so now we can move back to doing some oils so here I'm going to be doing a lot more concentrated oil work um as opposed to like big general areas so I'm not flooding the surface with thinner at this point and that's mainly because I want to have a little bit more control over for how I how I blend the oil paints in here so really what I'm doing here is using a th you know a thinner soaked brush and pulling back those little bits of of oil paint to create these streaks of you know these oil streaks underneath the engine pan or like yeah you know hydraulic leaks or or grease stains behind the wing the flaps something like that um and so this is this is a really great effect that's pretty simple to do and but I think adds a lot so the final thing that I'm going to be doing here is just kind of spritzing on really highly thinned oil paint across the bottom just to kind of create this speckled dirty look so I'm literally just flicking the brush that's loaded with highly thinned oil paint to create those spots so that wraps up the weathering and at this point we can now just kind of start finalizing the build so there's a lot of parts here that I'm adding on that I painted off off screen and I I have to consciously make that choice as to what to show you and what not to show you what I think is most valuable to show you so there's a lot of things like the wheels landing gear the engine exhaust things like that that um you know I could easily balloon this video out to an hour trying to show you all those minute little things but let me know let me know down in the comments what you think about that should I be including more those detail things or kind of more so concentrating on the stuff that I'm doing now um I'd really like to hear your feedback on that so here we can add the landing gear the uh the nose wheel well a little iffy on getting the fit in there but you know eventually I do get it uh you just have to be careful because there are some photo Parts on there that you don't want to knock off on accident main landing gear going on and surprising how short they are um but you know just kind of the nature of the type of aircraft with the tricycle landing gear as opposed to like a um tail dragger type aircraft but those go on and then we can start fitting on the landing gear doors um most of these parts are all being super glued on by the way I'm not using the the model cement for these just creates a faster Bond so these get added on again not terribly difficult the the uh these parts were a little bit more difficult to get on Just because the the contact points were pretty small to get this glued on but now we can start adding the machine gun barrels so these are the on the original aircraft they were supposed to be 303s for British service but I believe that they were replaced with 30 calibers once they were moved back into US service I could be wrong though but it still retained the 20 mm cannon in in the nose as opposed to the 37mm cannon of the p38s or sorry the p-39s um so now we can paint the navigation lights and the formation lights so I'm starting with a chrome base um and then while the Chrome is drying we're going to add the Pilot's door I just I love the uniqueness of this aircraft and that it basically has you know car doors essentially and I know that the what is it the British Tempest um the typhoon had something similar as well um but I digress once the uh the Chrome dries I go over the formation lights and the navigation lights with clear Tamia paints uh using blue green and red respectively so the the Chrome just kind of helps add a nice little like reflective tint to it and then I also hit drop it over with a little bit of gloss as well and there we go so this is Edward's 148 scale P400 of the cactus Air Force as it was flown off of guadala canal in the Pacific Theater really really enjoyed this kit it was a lot of fun and I had a blast doing it and um definitely want to add a few more of these kits to my collection there are some really cool unique paint schemes that the the P39 and the p400s wore during the War uh there's some really great like desert ones that are all tan uh as well as some very colorful p400s with you know Sharp mouths and really crazy designs on them so I recommend this kit cautiously just because it is older it will require a little bit of work and it's not nearly as detailed as more modern kits but um I mean in the scale you really can't beat it and uh so I I would ultimately recommend it um if you've made it this far into the video I really appreciate it I hope you consider subscribing to the channel um and hitting the notifications so that you can get notified when I up upload new videos I really tried hard to get a new video uploaded every week and I alternate between full builds and inbox reviews and throw in occasional other types of videos as well but I really try to make sure I have new content for you every Friday so um if you wouldn't mind subscribing I'd really appreciate it if you like what I do um and you want to consider helping support the channel consider subscribing to my um my patreon the information is down below the uh the patreons that I do have really help to um bring you some great content and uh it helps me to it refine my processes refine my video editing skills and to overall increase the production of my videos so if you like what I do maybe consider subscribing to that um but otherwise just a like or a comment would be great I love interacting with you folks in the comment section so let me know uh The Good The Bad whatever uh if you hate it let me know I wouldn't mind knowing you know learning why so huge shout out to the patrons that I have and their support and their their continued um encouragement to me I really appreciate it and we will see you on the next video take care everyone

Channel: Hammerhead Model Making

Views: 24,285

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Id: y5ziVXcS6uc

Length: 36min 55sec (2215 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 22 2024