Resuming after a holiday break, I finished the model on January 2. Once the fuselage was closed and the wings and undercarriage were glued, the major work involved rigging the undercarriage, wings and control wires.

Castor Oil, Grim, Mud, Dirt and Goo

Reference photos show that once an Eindecker went into front-line service, it rapidly became stained, oily, and dirty. The two main factors were the dirt and grass airfields, which soon became muddy during most months of the year (except when they became snow-packed ice fields), and the engines which threw off their lubricating fluid as they operated. My understanding is that this was primarily castor oil, or some similar substance that was ubiquitous to all rotary engines. Consequently, I had no choice but to dirty up the wings and fuselage. Fun!

• Kit No. QB 72 374 Exhaust & Damper Cooler, $5.50
• Kit No. QB 72 375 Gun Barrels, $5.50
• Kit No. QB 72 376 Undercarriage Covers, $5.50

These are simple but clean sets of precisely cast resin replacement parts that quickly and easily improve already good 1/72 scale early P-40 kits. Each set consists of one gray resin block with easily removed molded parts. The hollowed-out exhausts, scale thin damper cooler flaps, machine gun barrels with oblong cooling vents, and detailed undercarriage covers (landing gear doors) are intended for Airfix’s new-tool 1/72 Curtiss Hawk 81-A-2 (P-40B/C) kit, but can fit other kits as well. QB 72 374 has two rows of six round exhaust pipes attached to the resin block by a narrow feed that can be easily sawed free, as can the Damper Cooler (the cowl flaps underneath the rear end of the engine).

The Kliment Voroshilov (KV) tanks were a series of Soviet Red Army heavy tanks, named after the Soviet defense commissar. The KV series were known for their extremely heavy armor protection during the early part of World War II, especially during the first year of the invasion of the Soviet Union. Later in the war, the KV series became a base of development for the Joseph Stalin (Iosif Stalin, or IS) series of tanks. The KV-85 was a KV-1S with the 85mm D-5T cannon in a new turret, and with the ball mounted hull machine gun removed and the hole welded shut. 148 of these tanks were produced from the second half of 1943 until the spring of 1944 as a stopgap until the IS tank series entered production. This tank had its original turret, but later models were equipped with IS-1 turret.