Hello to all,
I'm new to online forums, so forgive me if I trip over my own words.
I'm about to start a Trumpeter -3 Hellcat, and having looked at the basic cockpit, it looks pretty good.
But a friend showed me his Eduard 1/48 -3 Hellcat, and the windows in back of their cockpit have, for lack of better terms, braces (...to be cemented in...) running through them, diagonally.
The Trumpeter kit lacks these braces.
So, back to my reference books. The only photo I can find, of a -3 Hellcat having a 'brace', is on page 24 of Bert Kinzey's "F6F Hellcat in Detail & Scale". But these look more like bulkhead braces, rather than window braces.
Even more confusing though, this same photo also shows a horizontal frame running across the middle of the back window. (Perhaps this photo is a very early -3? I don't know.)
I like to build what our fellow modelers of cars term as, 'curbside models'. I like to get my cockpits correct.
If this was just a matter of some toggle switches out of place, it wouldn't bug me so much. But these 'braces' seem prominent. Especially in 1/32 scale.
As Charlie Brown would shout, as Lucy pulled the football away, "Aaaaaaarrrggghhhh!"
Please, can someone out there help me? (A 'shrink' perhaps...)
Thanks!