Scale Caliber | 1/24 P-40 Engine

Reviewed by Jay Laverty

Impressive to say the least.

When I made the Vintage Fighter Series AVG P-40 I thought the engine in the kit looked OK. Not great but passable. After I started to have a close look I realised it wasn't as good as I had thought. Then after seeing the resin engine Robin is releasing in the Scale Caliber (American spelling!) range, I could see the difference in the palm of my hand.

And what a difference. Ornately detailed, the resin and white metal engine comes up miles ahead of the kit offering. Where the kit has the manifolds on the top represented as a couple of strips of plastic, the resin versions are accurately shaped and look the part. The rest of the detail is accurately and intricately represented, and to make things even better, there is no cutting or altering of the kit's parts required as the entire engine is a straight swap for the kit parts. A couple of the kit parts need to be used on the resin engine, namely the pipes attached to the air filters, but these are round in the kit, and that is pretty much all you can expect with tubes.

The set also includes new and infinitely better prop blades, as well as the mounting lug to make fitting them into the spinner very straightforward.

The assembly is straightforward, and judging by the finished engine Robin showed to me at Southern Expo, the fit of all of the parts is excellent and will require no great effort in assembling. In fact, all of the resin parts are cast and cut ready to go, and the minimal amount of cleanup imaginable is required to get the parts ready for assembly.

In fact this set is pretty much the epitome of what I look for in a resin detail set, with ease of assembly and great representation of detail, so I personally give this set a glowing endorsement, and if you are looking at sprucing up your P-40 then this is one place to start.

Which will be updated shortly and revised at which point information for the P-40 sets will be added. At a price of £23.95 this will not be the cheapest detail set you buy this year, but if you are building the Vintage P-40 then it will be very useful and well worth the investment.

So far we have some wonderful Flaps, now an excellent engine, and we can look forward to a cockpit, and some details for the guns in the near future. Keep 'em coming Robin!

© Jay Laverty 2006

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This review was published on Saturday, July 02 2011; Last modified on Wednesday, May 18 2016