What I was trying to decide, without any real knowledge or evidence to base my decision on, was how much time was spent on the real artwork on the real aircraft. The nicely graduated flesh tones on the PYN-Up Decals would have been time consuming to paint on the real aircraft. Mixing a few highlight and shadow flesh tones and applying them as seen on the original Cutting Edge version would be simpler.

Here is where I made a trip to Meteor Productions (for some shopping) and talked about the "Air-A-Cutie" decals with Dave Klaus. While I did not get a chance to see the reference images Dave has on this aircraft, he was able to confirm the artworks had graduated flesh tones. On the real aircraft they are much more crude than the PYN-Up Decals make them, but Dave explained that making the decals accurate to the real artwork would have made them look like they were really poorly printed decals. They chose on designing the artwork for the decals to err on the side of being too nicely rendered so that modelers would not complain of poorly printed decals.

I could live with that answer, and I decide to use the PYN-Up Decals for the model.

Just to be safe, I coated the PYN-Up Decals with SuperFilm to make sure they would not explode when I used them. I had a friend use PYN-Up Decals that exploded on him. Only having one set of these decals, I did not want to risk it. With SuperFilm on them, the PYN-Up Decals behaved very well and even conformed over the edges of the cockpit doors with no real issues.

All the rest of the markings on the model come from the Hasegawa decal sheet. The Hasegawa decals are Cartograf printed, so they worked really well with Solv-a-set. The white of the national insignia is a different intensity from the painted areas, but I could live with it.

For weathering, I used my typical style of thinned down enamel paint washes and air brush shading. I finished the weathering with some dry brushing to further distress the painted finish and pop out some surface details. For a more complete discussion of what I do to weather my models, see my posting on "Weathering Aircraft".

After painting and decals, all that remained were the seemingly thousands of little things to finish up so that the model can be completed. The landing gear came first. It assembled without a hitch and plugged into the locating holes in the wheel wells without problems.

Hasegawa provides clear lights for the navigation lights in the kit, but I think they were an afterthought of the kit designers. All the lights are molded in place on the airframe. The instructions tell you to cut off these molded bumps that are the lights. Then, they say to glue in place the clear parts. Well, I considered that to be too much trouble, so I just left the solid lights in place and painted them in maroon (Humbrol #20), Beret Green (Testors "little bottles"), and silver.

According to Hasegawa, "Air-A-Cutie" was actually two aircraft. I don't really buy this story, but they claim the version without the white tail is a Airacobra P-400 while the version with the white tail is a P-39D Airacobra. I think they base this on the engine exhaust stacks. According to the Detail&Scale book, engine changes were a common practice on the P-39Ds and P-400s. Hence the engine exhaust stacks could be different without being a different airframe. I believe that the engine was changed much more readily than having all the nose body panels and doors being switched between two airframes in order to preserve the elaborate artworks.

Either way, one of the last things I did on the model was paint up the engine exhausts and attach them. Since I like the look of the six-stack exhausts better, and Hasegawa said it was right on the white-tailed aircraft, I used those on the model.

Sorry, Lee. It is definitely a cliché in modeling, but I am still happy to have it sitting on model shelves.