Rowsdower's 1:72 Witty Wings Bong P-38 Review
Posted: Thu Jan 23, 2014 2:01 pm
Well I finally had time to put it together.
The Good
Over all a great looking P-38. The polished aluminum finish is really nice and the painting and printing is crisp and well done. The nose art of Marge on the nose looks great. Lots of detail in both the die-cast and plastic portions of the model. The exposed .50 cal barrels in the nose have good detail. Cockpit and bong himself do as well.
There are a number of small detail parts you must put on yourself. While these look great and add to the realism, with my hand tremors this was no easy task. The antenna on the nose underside and pitot tube weren't bad but the counter-balances on the tailplane were just about impossible, very tiny, a difficult shape to apply pressure to get it in the hole firmly, and when you put one in, the other would push out. These pieces should have been attached at the factory as they are on my other models. Not enough to warrant being on my "bad" list, but an unnecessary pain in the arse.
The Bad
I love the look of the P-38 with the drop tanks inboard the engines. Unfortunately, they just freely slide in and out of the large slots under the wings. There is no way to keep them in there besides glue. What kind of design is this? So basically they are useless unless you glue them and then you cant fit the thing back into the plastic clam shell for storage. This made me upset. I may try a little piece of Plasti-Tac on the post. It is removable and has helped me solve a lot of problems on models without glue. The rockets attach the same way but I didn't even bother with them as I don't want them on there and it is the same arrangement anyway.
I display my models wheels-up, so I can't speak on the landing gear, but all three of the closed door pieces attach via pegs and will fall off if you sneeze in the next room. I will likely just glue those but again, seriously? A minor nitpick is that the main gear doors have no detail molded into them there the two doors join together
And now for my main grief. I can deal with or fix the problems above but the included stand is a POS failure! It is basically an up-scaled Easymodel stand, except even though this aircraft weighs a hell of a lot more than an plastic Easymodel plane the stand is even flimsier and the attachment method is laughable.
Basically, you get a thin plastic triangular base with a flimsy support arm. But the kicker is that the point of attachment to the model is nothing more than a plastic peg that sticks into a hole at the rear of the fuselage. There is no rubber as on Corgi stands, no friction at all, in fact the peg wants to squeeze itself out of the hole. The only thing keeping the model on the stand is the weight of the plane itself! Unbelievable for such a large model!
There was a removable plastic piece at the front of the stand much like on, again, Easymodel stands where it states the name of the aircraft, except it is blank. Kind of leads me to believe this stand was reused from a much smaller model. I shaved it down a bit which helped as I believe the peg is not the correct shape for the socket in the plane. I suppose I might again try a little bit of Plasti-Tac to hold it together.
So I finally put down the tweezers and gave up on the bottom counter balance, just leaving the top on installed which isn't so bad since you really can't see it. I cleared out a good space on my shelf and carefully set the whole thing down. The stand fell off and one of the gear doors fell off. I fixed the door and carefully lowered it onto the stand, as I said before the only thing keeping it attached is it's own weight.
Once you get it place where you want it, ad the whole thing stops wobbling back and forth after about a minute, it really is a nice looking P-38 and looks great next to my P-47 and P-51. I'm a little bit disappointed but since I got it as a gift and didn't pay for it myself I am ok with it. Being used to Corgi and now seeing this, I'm not sure I would get another Witty aircraft however.
The Good
Over all a great looking P-38. The polished aluminum finish is really nice and the painting and printing is crisp and well done. The nose art of Marge on the nose looks great. Lots of detail in both the die-cast and plastic portions of the model. The exposed .50 cal barrels in the nose have good detail. Cockpit and bong himself do as well.
There are a number of small detail parts you must put on yourself. While these look great and add to the realism, with my hand tremors this was no easy task. The antenna on the nose underside and pitot tube weren't bad but the counter-balances on the tailplane were just about impossible, very tiny, a difficult shape to apply pressure to get it in the hole firmly, and when you put one in, the other would push out. These pieces should have been attached at the factory as they are on my other models. Not enough to warrant being on my "bad" list, but an unnecessary pain in the arse.
The Bad
I love the look of the P-38 with the drop tanks inboard the engines. Unfortunately, they just freely slide in and out of the large slots under the wings. There is no way to keep them in there besides glue. What kind of design is this? So basically they are useless unless you glue them and then you cant fit the thing back into the plastic clam shell for storage. This made me upset. I may try a little piece of Plasti-Tac on the post. It is removable and has helped me solve a lot of problems on models without glue. The rockets attach the same way but I didn't even bother with them as I don't want them on there and it is the same arrangement anyway.
I display my models wheels-up, so I can't speak on the landing gear, but all three of the closed door pieces attach via pegs and will fall off if you sneeze in the next room. I will likely just glue those but again, seriously? A minor nitpick is that the main gear doors have no detail molded into them there the two doors join together
And now for my main grief. I can deal with or fix the problems above but the included stand is a POS failure! It is basically an up-scaled Easymodel stand, except even though this aircraft weighs a hell of a lot more than an plastic Easymodel plane the stand is even flimsier and the attachment method is laughable.
Basically, you get a thin plastic triangular base with a flimsy support arm. But the kicker is that the point of attachment to the model is nothing more than a plastic peg that sticks into a hole at the rear of the fuselage. There is no rubber as on Corgi stands, no friction at all, in fact the peg wants to squeeze itself out of the hole. The only thing keeping the model on the stand is the weight of the plane itself! Unbelievable for such a large model!
There was a removable plastic piece at the front of the stand much like on, again, Easymodel stands where it states the name of the aircraft, except it is blank. Kind of leads me to believe this stand was reused from a much smaller model. I shaved it down a bit which helped as I believe the peg is not the correct shape for the socket in the plane. I suppose I might again try a little bit of Plasti-Tac to hold it together.
So I finally put down the tweezers and gave up on the bottom counter balance, just leaving the top on installed which isn't so bad since you really can't see it. I cleared out a good space on my shelf and carefully set the whole thing down. The stand fell off and one of the gear doors fell off. I fixed the door and carefully lowered it onto the stand, as I said before the only thing keeping it attached is it's own weight.
Once you get it place where you want it, ad the whole thing stops wobbling back and forth after about a minute, it really is a nice looking P-38 and looks great next to my P-47 and P-51. I'm a little bit disappointed but since I got it as a gift and didn't pay for it myself I am ok with it. Being used to Corgi and now seeing this, I'm not sure I would get another Witty aircraft however.