Make gear doors for an ESM P-40
Howdy! I am working on an ESM P-40 Warhawk and would like to make some functional landing gear doors. The kit just has a cover on the bottom of the gear "pod" with a slot for the strut to move through. I've got some pretty good pictures of P-40 landing gear and it looks like there are basically 2 doors- a large, curved rectangular one and a smaller one.
I tried making some out of fiberglass by layering epoxy, fiber glass, and thin plywood strips on a cardboard tube. Then I cut them to shape and epoxied hinges to the side. Trouble was, after laying on my workbench for a couple months one of the doors warped significantly. I tried to bend it back to shape and broke the corner off. Seems they came out very brittle.
So I was wondering what other materials and methods do modelers use for gear doors? Perhaps a thin sheet of aluminum or brass? Something that just occurred to me was to lay a piece of plastic on a tube and then heat it with a heat gun to give it a curve.
What works for you?
Last edited by ho2zoo; 12-30-2018 at 11:19 PM.