Here's an update on my 1/72 Heller/Humbrol F4U-1A after a few days,
Working in subassemblies, so as one thing dries, I can work on something else and keep the build going...

Note that the cockpit tub hangs off the back wall, without a firm attachment point at the front, so here I glued in a hefty piece of sprue to hold it firm (and pressed-fit the fuselage halves to ensure the cockpit was square and true)...

Further subassembly work, painting wherever possible...

Then, even though I've vowed to build this straight from the box, the seat will be too exposed to leave off seatbelts, so I'm cutting them from masking tape...

Cheers!
-Sean.

I am calling this one done. Needless to say it turned out way better then the Revell F4U I did about a year ago. (Sorry that my camera sucks! Saving to go back to college!)

Very nice work Michael, finished already and it looks great !

I have been working on the sub-assemblies for my F4U-2 Night Fighter build here, and had an hour to spare today so I threw some Interior Green (Gunze H-58) at this as well as a P-47 for the SIG Pin-Ups Campaign (shameless plug, I know).



I am hoping to sit down tonight and do some detail painting in the cockpit.

Cheers, D

Thanks Aussie! I was rather anxious to build for this campaign. I am thinking of trying to track down an A-7. If I do, I will be sure to post! But, as always, I intend to keep watching this! Always something new to learn!

Nicely done Michael! I'm sure with a good camera available it would look perfect. Is there a lot of problems with the Revel kit? I was planning to build Revell's F4FU-5.

Thank you Emre for the kind words! I am by no means any good at scratchbuilding and to make the folding wings look any good at all requires some skill that I inherently lack. It is a solid depiction, but the wings gave me trouble. Folded down they did not sit right, and folded up looked nice, but if you looked at the mechanism it did not do it for me. If my memory serves me correctly, very little putty was used, but the wings really turned me off on it. Granted, my skills have improved a bit since, but I still would not be confident in my ability to make it look good.

Funny you should say that
I'm in with that very kit. Here's a peek inside the box.

Well, I was mistaken by the kit, I was referring to the 1/48 Corsair, my bad. But, I stand by that review of the 1/48 revell kit. (depicting Korean Conflict loadout and radar)

Jessica, thanks for the inbox sneak peek, but I was also asking about the 1/48 scale kit with the radar

Thanks for the info Michael. If there are no difficult fit issues I think I can build it just fine. Eduard's Bf 110D is driving me nuts... so much that I think of quitting building aircraft and go back to building armor kits!

I've got some paint on the inside bits.

Jessie, if you build the kit with the boxart markings, I think we'll be building the same plane in different scale I got my kit confused with the other Revell Corsair that comes with a radar and French markings, but a friend stole that from me and then gave me the F4U-5 in return.

I was going over the instructions and checking them against online data. I think the sidewalls in the cockpit should be black rather than green. The instructions also show that the landing gear and the wheel hubs are painted in blue... I'm confused by that. Can it really be true?

I'm not surprised by the black sidewalls; that was pretty common in Korean War vintage aircraft. It'll be easy to correct given the small size of the cockpit. I'm so not used to doing 1/72 fighter-sized aircraft. Everything's so tiny.

The wheels, struts, wheel wells, doors and everything else should be blue. This was a standard US Navy finish for their overall Sea Blue aircraft. It makes assembly and painting easy

Speaking of assembly, this one's going pretty quickly.





The only fit issue so far is the wing to fuselage. It wants to twist away from true. it was also pretty tight until I sanded the front and rear edges of the lower wing a little. Perhaps I sanded them slightly off square? I think I've persuaded it to stay in the right place so now it's time to let everything harden and come back to clean up later.

Emre, while researching the age old question of flat or glossy finish for my corsair, I believe I stumbled across an answer to your question, and it goes along with what Jessie said in terms of the time period. The WWII vintage F4Us had the zinc chromate, and the white or grey on the landing gear and wheel centers, but the later models were shipped with the overall sea blue on the above parts. Hope that helps a bit!

I'm pretty sure that even the later WW II aircraft were shipped this way. It controlled corrosion equally well and was simpler and faster to paint, which saved time during construction, not to mention simplifying the Supply Officer's job. Instead of needing to carry supplies of zinc chromate and interior green, the only colours needed weres sea blue, white and black. Every little saving helped

Thanks for the confirmation about the blue color. Everything in blue can make for easier maintenance and supply, but it also makes the model look a little... well, boring I guess. The challenge is now to make it interesting.

I should probably get started with my Corsair as well.

For some strange reason, military planners seem to be utterly uninterested in the problems of modellers making replicas of their equipment.

More progress on my corsair.



Added the seatbelts.



Closed up the fuselage halfs



Construted the wings



I'll attach the wings to the fuselage and will add some more pictures over the weenend.

Martin

OK, I'll show my sprues:



And the decals:


No idea where the Navy decal is supposed to go.

I wouldn't call that Navy Mark, it's more Sky Blue

Cheers, D

Hi Guys
I started with a 1D from Tamiya 1/48 with Eduard detail, and true detail wheels
Official Picture:

some PE on the cockpit



Motor process:





Javier

Nice work Javier. moving along nicely.

D, You don't do paint judging, do you???????

Hi folks!
As soon as I have finished my 2 Jap fighters (should be done within the next few days) I will throw these goodies on my assembly line .....

..... decals come from Sky Models, I bought this set last year on the expo in Basel/Switzerland .....

.... in the end they should come out as a RAF Bird Cage (first profile) and a Kiwi Corsair (last profile). Anyone of you out there know what "Light Grey" I should use for the RNZAF bird? FS-No.?


Happy modelling and good success for all your builds!
Torsten

Okay, I cleared my workbench and here I go!

This is the kit I will be building. Courtesy of an old friend:



I will be building it mostly out of the box... with the exception of the seat and the wheels. Those will be resin replacements from Ultracast. Like this:



At the moment I painted the cockpit and the propeller. I had some zinc chromate left in my airbrush and didn't want to spill it into the waste jar... so I quickly opened up an Accurate Miniatures P-51, assembled the cockpit and painted that as well!

Photos will follow possibly tomorrow, when everything dries so I can brush-paint the details.

Torsten: There was some discussion over on Britmodeller about that grey/white RNZAF scheme on the Skymodels sheet and the consensus is that it's bogus and was in fact a heavily faded tri-color scheme. All RNZAF Corsair's were delivered in Tri-color or GSB.

Note you can do two corsairs in a 2-tone scheme. Very early F4U-1's in US service had the blue/grey over grey scheme and very late AU-1's in USMC service had Gull grey over white.

Emre, the ground crew need to be fired! They've installed that poor airplane's control stick backwards!