RE: PICA P-40 Build.
Yesterday I was able to get the foam epoxyd and sanded. As per my usual, I sanded thru the class cloth and exposed the foam and had to repair that tonight. Originally I used West Systems epoxy and epoxy resin with 3/4 oz cloth. I should have thought it out a bit more. This area will probably need a bit more strength being on the leading edge of the wing and could easily bump things so tonight I repaired the fairings using much heavier cloth. I can only guess that maybe it was 2 oz cloth, it seemed the strands were about 3 times as thick as the 3/4 oz glass strands. Anyway I have used the pictures on the wing and other pictures to shape the fairings. I will have to add a bit of bondo to build up a couple areas to the proper shape.
I am about ready to start on the gun barrels and fairings. I found that a couple old aluminum exhaust tubes that I cut off a muffler and some wood plugs I found at Michaels craft place, will make most of the gun fairing, I will just need to make some barrels, that should be easy.
I have handled several .50 Cal. Brownings but my best guess it that if the barel had a bore dia. of .50 inch, the Outside Diameter of the barrel must be around 1 1/4 inches. I wish I could find the pictures of the .50 cals from the nose turret of the Collings Foundation B-24. I restored them and several other items for them during the annual maintenance here in Florida. One morning I went out the back door of my house and saw the neighbors with kinda odd expressions on their face as they were looking at the 500 lb bombs that was reding for them too. Was really funny, they were dying to ask.... If anyone has the Outside Dimension of the .50 cal gun barrel, I would really appreciate that information. I will scale that down to 1/5 scale. I guess finding the locations for the guns and boring some holes the diameter of the aluminum tubing will be my next thing to figure out.
Denny