Curtiss Mohawk by ccoyle - TERMINATED - Answer - 1/33 scale - card - H-75 export version of P-36 Hawk

[ccoyle]

Welcome to my abbreviated build log for the Curtiss Mohawk! Since MSW is dedicated to ship modeling, I will not be cluttering up the message traffic by updating this log as regularly as I would for a ship model, just so y'all know.

 

The Mohawk was the RAF designation for the export version of Curtiss' successful P-36 Hawk design. This 1/33 scale card model kit was deigned by Lukasz Fuczek and published in 2020 by the Polish firm of Answer. The kit consists of four pages of parts and 2.5 pages of diagrams. There are no English instructions. The kit depicts an aircraft of No. 1 Operational Training Unit of the Indian Air Force in 1942. Since I can't read Polish, I'm not entirely clear on what variant of the P-36 the model is supposed to represent, but the text does say "H-75A-3." That doesn't seem very likely, considering that all but two of that variant went to France. More likely the kit depicts an H-75A-4, a large number of which were diverted to England and, being deemed inadequate for operations in the ETO, were shipped off to India, where they fought primarily in the Burma theater.

 

So rapid were developments in aviation in the late 1930s that the P-36 was already obsolete by the time war broke out. Nevertheless, the P-36 and its variants served admirably wherever they happened to be. Especially to be noted is that H-75s of the French Armée de l'Air accounted for roughly a third of all French aerial victories during the Battle of France while making up only 12.6% of France's single-seat fighter force. French H-75 pilots claimed 230 kills for the loss of 29 aircraft.

 

I have a soft spot for the P-36, because it is an interwar aircraft with remarkably clean, well-balanced looks. I often marvel at how these early all-metal monoplanes and their more glamorous successors, like Curtiss' own P-40 series, enjoyed only a decade in the spotlight before being eclipsed by jets. But what a moment in the spotlight it was!

 

 

 

 

 

Enjoy!

 

 

[mtaylor]

Looking forward to this Chris.  A rather rare warbird to say the least.   As far the decade you mentioned, war is a great stimulus of technology.  If WWII hadn't happened, the jets probably wouldn't have appeared in numbers until late '50's.  Or possibly later even.

[Egilman]

I'm here, I'm always amazed at these paper things when they are finished... I know it's just another medium, but it's one I've never been able to get a foot in. My attempts always seem to bubble, wrinkle and warp......

 

 

It amazes me what some modelers can do with them... Fascinating...

 

 

[Edwardkenway]

I'll follow along also, seeing someone turn flat card into a model is always amazing. 

3 hours ago, Egilman said:

I know it's just another medium, but it's one I've never been able to get a foot in. My attempts always seem to bubble, wrinkle and warp......

I've also tried but they get the better of me too!!

[Canute]

I think we were still flying some of these in the Philippines at the start of the war in the Pacific. Thanks to MacArthur's mis-management, we lost any air force we had in the first few days. Many were lost sitting on the ground. 

[Landlubber Mike]

I'm in on this one!  Agree with Egilman - so impressive that one can pull off these models with all the intricate curves using card as opposed to pre-formed plastic.  Looking forward to following along!

[ccoyle]

Okay, far enough along to justify an update. The build sequence for most card model airplanes starts with the cockpit, but for some reason this one starts with the wings. First, the internal formers. You might think that laser cut parts like this should fit perfectly, but they usually don't. Some minor trimming here and there was necessary. The key is to get the dimensions of the internal structure matched to those of the skins before one starts gluing the latter parts on.

 

 

Skins on next. Each is one large part, so there's a lot of glue that must first be applied, followed by quickly positioning the part. This is helped out by forming the sharp curve in the leading edge before attaching the skin.

 

 

Now comes the cockpit. Internal formers and seat come first. There's a rectangular part with four holes in the middle of the seat back. I have no idea if it's in the correct position. The diagrams were unclear on this bit, and I couldn't find any P-36 cockpit photos online that showed this particular part (even if one does find such a photo online, there's no guarantee that the seat in the photo is either period correct or correct for the H-75).

 

 

Interior cockpit skins with their various bits -- radio, throttle quadrants, etc.

 

 

Right skin on. The control stick consists of 14 separate parts -- bleah!

 

 

And finally, a couple of shots of the finished cockpit. Unlike many kits I have worked on, this kit did not include optional parts to allow for glazing the instrument panel. It does, though, include parts for building the two fuselage-mounted .30 caliber machine guns, but they are pretty basic structures. I'm going to omit them.

 

 

 

That's all for now!

[Edwardkenway]

Some very nice detail in the cockpit Chris, if the tabs for gluing were not shown it would be hard to tell it was card!!👍😁

[popeye the sailor]

cockpit and wings look really good    did you pre curve the leading edges?

[ccoyle]

2 hours ago, popeye the sailor said:

did you pre curve the leading edges?

 

Yes! Absolutely necessary, otherwise the paper wants to crease. I soften the fibers for shaping by lightly wetting the back of the paper with water -- it doesn't take much.

[ccoyle]

Fuselage, cont'd. Not really happy with this kit, which is too bad considering how much I like the subject. In short, there are a disturbing number of fit issues that I have only partially been able to navigate. On top of that, the diagrams are on the skimpy side; this has led to the discovery of a number of parts only after I have completed the particular structure to which they belong. Oopsie! Anyways, if the model is held at arm's length and viewed in dim light, it still creates the impression of a Mohawk.

 

[popeye the sailor]

considering you've done far better than I ever could,  I'm certain you'll come up with a really nice model.  I have no doubt that you'll be able to fudge the oops and pho pars,  and it will look just fine.   don't give up on it   

[Egilman]

Hey, if I was doing it it would look like a wrinkly noodle by now.... don't sell yourself short....

 

Looks wonderful from here......

[Old Collingwood]

31 minutes ago, Egilman said:

Hey, if I was doing it it would look like a wrinkly noodle by now.... don't sell yourself short....

 

Looks wonderful from here......

Same with me  - infact it would look like a swan.

 

OC.

[Edwardkenway]

Mine would be a crumpled ball of card in the bin😂 I'm not that good when getting frustrated 🤬 but card is one of your things and I think you'll pull it off 😉

[Landlubber Mike]

Looks great to me Chris.  I'm impressed you can pull off all those curves and details in card!

[ccoyle]

Thanks, guys, I do appreciate the encouragement, but I'm being honest with my assessment. There are folks who are far better at working in this medium than I. I can only try to get better each time and try new things. Some kits go together better than others (kinda like wood kits in that respect). Some turn out great and hold up well under close scrutiny, others benefit from some thoughtful and judicious camera work. This one will fall into the latter category, methinks.

[mtaylor]

Keep at it, Chris.  It's just like the wood or plastic side... the more you do, the better you get at it.

[ccoyle]

Additional work on the empennage, plus wing mated to fuselage. Main story here is the wing -- there are pretty much zero instructions on how to afix this to the fuselage. The wing fits between two fuselage bulkheads, but the space produced by them was about 2 mm too short. So I took my best guess at how to fix the problem and simply whacked 2 mm off the aft end of the wing structure. But the wing still wouldn't fit, because the cutouts in the fuselage skins were in the way. So, reckoning that any damage would be covered by the wing fillets, I hacked away at the offending fuselage skins; this was either going to work or be an irretrievable disaster and wind up in the Great Bin in the Sky. Since there were no internal formers to help mate the wing to the fuselage, I first looked at many online images of P-36s and then, once again, made a best guess at how the wing and fuselage should be positioned relative to each other. Final judgement of the outcome would hinge on whether all my guesswork ultimately allowed the wing fillets to be positioned more or less correctly and hide all of the radical surgery. Happily, the fillets went on without much fuss, and everything looks good to go for continued construction.

 

[mtaylor]

Looks good.  The roll of the dice on this worked out.

[popeye the sailor]

sometime ya gotta just fly by the seat of your pants      look'in good  

[CW_Tom]

It looks great. I’d never heard of card models before until I came here. 

[Old Collingwood]

1 hour ago, CW_Tom said:

It looks great. I’d never heard of card models before until I came here. 

Not much that doesn't go on here  - if they make it - we will build it.

 

OC.

[CW_Tom]

You sound like an engineer!  (Army, that is.)

[ccoyle]

12 hours ago, CW_Tom said:

I’d never heard of card models before until I came here.

 

I've been building card models for roughly 20 years now, but I'm still far from being an advanced practitioner. If you want to see some fantastic card models, check out the builds listed here. Danny was a master of the medium. Sadly, he passed away earlier this year, but he left behind a lot of content to continue inspiring us.

[popeye the sailor]

amen!

[ccoyle]

Rant Mode: ON

 

This kit continues to thumb its nose at me and challenge me to "just try and finish me, nyaah!!" I have this sneaking suspicion that the single sheet of diagrams printed one-sided on text-weight paper was supposed to be double-sided, as there is an inexcusable paucity of diagrams. There are, for example, no diagrams at all that show the construction of the wings, ailerons, elevators, or engine. The lack of engine diagram in particular is baffling. I have built a number of radial engines in the past, so I have a general idea of how they are usually built in a card kit, but with only the numbered parts to go by and no diagram, this engine appears to be significantly different. It's a Wright Cyclone, which was a common enough power plant, but these kit parts will not go together in any fashion that resembles a Cyclone.

 

I have a spare kit of a Bloch MB.152, which has a Gnome-Rhone 14-cylider engine. I'm going to see if I can use that kit's cylinder heads for the H-75. Will report back later ...

 

Rant Mode: OFF

 

EDIT: Rant Mode: Retraction

 

I found some of the "missing" diagrams, including one for the engine cylinders. 🙄 The Gnome-Rhone engine was a no-go, being likewise over-simplified, so I'm going to have to make do with the kit engine.

[ccoyle]

Well, this kit continues to be exasperating, and I'm emotionally about ready to bin it. After finishing the engine, which as I pointed out earlier is very oversimplified, and getting its cowling done with little difficulty, it was on to the landing gear. Now, the P-36 had a very complex set of landing gear doors, and the kit has, I'm sorry to say, made their construction virtually impossible to figure out. To begin with, the kit includes separate parts for inner and outer surfaces of the door bits (i.e. exterior color, interior color); higher quality kits often accomplish this with two-sided printing. Laminating two parts together results in a part that is too thick, so I have been ditching the interior parts and painting the reverse side of the exterior parts instead. This isn't an insurmountable problem, obviously. The real issue is the large number of door parts and their indecipherable diagrams (below).

 

 

At first glance these might seem very detailed, but the problem is that the gears and doors themselves consist of so many parts that the diagrams fail to clearly show how some of them fit together. For example, there is no clear view of the forward end of part 61, nor is there any hint at how parts 60 and 60' are articulated, nor how part 60' is supposed to fit to the wing. And this is by no means an exhaustive list.

 

This is all very exasperating. I don't like models that are half model kit and half mind-bender puzzle. And as I have ranted about previously, this isn't the first aggravating construction stage I've encountered with this kit. But I also don't like feeling 'defeated' by a kit. The problem is that an annoying and unfulfilling kit tends to get less and less construction time devoted to it and simply ends up delaying the start of a kit I might enjoy much more.

 

Frustrating ...

 

And for a cherry on top, I managed to get a large dollop of interior green right on top of the recently completed engine cowling, with no idea how I accomplished that. 😡

[lmagna]

I gave your post a thumbs up Chris, not because of your issues but because of your effort at dealing with them.  But I agree with the feeling that at some point the actual model prevents the accomplishment of the dream that was in your head when you started. I hope that is not the case here but I think we have all been there at some time or another possibly more often than we wish or would like to admit.

[ccoyle]

Well, I came home after work and looked at the diagrams again, hoping for a moment of clarity. None was forthcoming. So the decision has been made and the bench has been cleared. I didn't toss the model, but it is currently occupying a place of dishonor up on a high shelf.

 

So, what is next? One of the things I would like to experiment with is using shellac to stiffen laser-cut formers. I have a number of kits that I think would suit the purpose. To be a candidate, the kit had to:

• have clear diagrams
• be a kit I had a vacuformed canopy for or else have only a windscreen -- no scratch-built canopies
• not be an especially high-value kit, like anything in my Halinski collection.

Candidates include a Fokker E.V from Kartonowa Kolekcja (I have successfully completed two KK kits), a PWS-26 trainer in Hungarian livery (a Marek Pacyinski design, of which I have attempted two and completed one), and a PWS-10 from CardPlane (I'm three for four on CardPlane kits), for which I have two different liveries (Spanish Nationalist or Polish "White Tail"). I'll have to meditate on these options -- and of course I have been known to go off the rails and choose some previously unconsidered option. 🙄