1/48 Academy P-47N

Gallery Article by Graham Tarran

 

Republic P47N “Expected Goose”463rd FS, 503rd FG Le Shima 1945

Here’s the Academy P47N.  This was my first Academy P47, being a devotee of the Hasegawa offerings but my inspiration for tackling this model came from a superb article & build in a recent SAMI article (Nov 2001) by Nicholas Wigman.  In this article he used the Aires engine, gun bay & cockpit sets.  I didn’t feel competent with the engine set & couldn’t find the gun bay set but got hold of the cockpit set & got to work.  The cockpits are a let down in both the Hasegawa & Academy kits being a bit sparse.  However there’s not a fantastic amount that can be seen through the opening, even with an open canopy.  The Aires set goes together & fits well.  The only snag (as the SAMI article pointed out) is the lack of a positive location for the instrument panel.

The kit engine looks good with careful painting & dry brushing.  The Academy kit offers two open gun bays & I opted to leave one open, securing the loose panel to the wing surface with a little blue tack.

I painted the cockpit interior “US interior green” with the gun bay & wheel wells “zinc chromate”.  With hindsight, I suspect that the cowling interior should also be “ZC” but sprayed it “interior green”.  Gun barrels were carefully drilled out.  

 

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Wing stripes & the entire tail unit are insignia yellow, anti-gale panel is olive drab.

The Academy P47N & D kits come with a wealth of under wing stores.  As these aircraft were involved in long-range escort duties for B29’s, I went with a load of two large under wing tanks (designed for the P38 & I believe it was the RAF in Burma that first used them on the P47) with a smaller fuselage mounted drop tank.  The rest of the stores (bombs, rockets, bazooka tubes) are a welcome addition to the spares box. 

The yellow areas & anti glare panel were sprayed first, followed by Alclad II white aluminium over all with a few panels picked out in dark aluminium.  Decals are by Aeromaster (sheet 48-067).  Stencils are from the kit sheet, as Aeromaster don’t include any on theirs.  I had a bad experience using Academy decals on another of their offering so always try & use an aftermarket sheet now.  After application, the whole kit was given a light gloss coat to seal everything down.

A good, fun build; even with the extra work involved if using the Aires cockpit, the whole model went together very quickly with no filler (an achievement for me!).   

Graham Tarran

      

Photos and text © by Graham Tarran