The Little World

I have always been frustrated by the renaming and fuddling about with the P-40. I mean that business of calling it alternately the Warhawk, Tomahawk, or Kittyhawk, depending upon model number and air force it was flying for. I have given up trying to sort it all out and just call it the P-40 no matter whether the RAF, RCAF, RAAF, or USAAF were flying it. I do recognise the difference in the armament and fuselage between the short-tail versions and the long-tail ones but after that I mostly don’t care.

The basic build of the Hobby Boss kits was very Hobby Boss and went along quickly. Oh, goodness, could the other manufacturing plants learn a lesson or two from Hobby Boss when it comes to making a clean casting. Any flash cleanup is a scrape with the Xacto rather than cutting and sanding.

The fact that you cannot get the dihedral wrong with a Hobby Boss kit is wonderful. The empennage needs careful setting, but this is the case with everything. But you can literally have two ready-to-prime aircraft in two hours.

The only pesky part is masking around the leading-edge fairing for the landing gear. In the end I just masked as close as I could get and then reached for the rubber fluid bottle. Note that the planes can rest on their noses in a foam block and allow 360º spray paint coverage.

The other nice thing about HB construction is the fact that their landing gear legs generally go into a square socket which skews them to the proper angle without having to brace them in three directions.

The Hobby Boss models also have fairly pronounced frames on their canopies – this aids the bow-pen painting that I do.