Update
Considering the above laquer thinner mishap and my generally pokey build pace, rather than try to document rebuilding this along the way, I decided to abandon the rolling WIP, and just post when I had made actual progress.
9 and a half months later…
January-February
I got a bit obsessed with that stupid electrical box, and ended up making five or six versions using different approaches, trying to get the detail crisp enough. I still don’t love final result, but i’m over it, and besides, it's not exactly a focal point of the finished model. But I learned a lot about scratch building details, which made it worth it to me.
Naturally, I don’t have in-progress photos of it.
I do remember thinking about it a lot, imagining the structure of it, thinking about all the details, and in my mind it would seem to be large enough to require internal support. Then I realized that the longest dimension was slightly less than .25”.
I did attempt to photo etch a few parts, including for the electrical box, and the firewall. This was not successful, exactly, but kind of fascinating. I’m going to come back to DIY photo-etching later.
March - April
After finally giving up on photo etching, inspired by bvallot’s lovely F4F-3 conversion (http://cs.finescale.com/fsm/modeling_subjects/f/2/t/173752.aspx), I splurged on the Eduard PE set for the HobbyBoss kit.
It's not very visible in the finished model, so this was almost as much to get better at learning how to work with photo etch parts as anything. I mostly used Gator Grip to tack down the parts, and then thin CA after to fix them. The Gator Grip is easier to work with, in that it’s slow, but the bond isn’t that strong and the material itself has bulk. But when excess glue squeezes out, it’s easy to clean.
“The BUG” PE folding tool helped with the bends. This is one of those tools who’s utility and merit are not obvious (at least they weren’t to me) until you try it.
The gun ports are kind of poorly rendered out of the box, and since I intended to replace the guns with aluminum tubing from Albion, I decided to fill them and then drill the holes. I tried using Milliput to fill, which didn’t really work because the chunks didn’t really bond completely with the plastic and would just pop out when drilling. The proper way would probably be to use CA with a filler, sand smooth, and then rescribe everything obliterated by the sanding.
In the end I ended up living with the ports more or less as rendered, if cleaned up a little.
I also decided at the time that it would make sense to add the gun barrels at the end, after assembly and painting, and so included styrene anchor points but not the barrels themselves. Spoiler! It does not make sense to do it this way. My rationale was that I’d save myself masking. Masking is super easy. Aligning aluminum tubes before the wings are assembled is super easy. Trying to get them seated after? Not so much.
The firewall painted, with the engine mount added, following bvallot’s playbook. I added various cables and conduits later, and then gave it a wash and dry brushed the details.
Paint! Masks!
The paint is Mr Paint. I really like how it goes on. I’m not going to say it’s better than Tamiya with Tamiya lacquer thinner, but it’s pretty good. The colors (at least Blue Grey and Sky Grey) are spot on. Part of it, is that it’s a lot thinner than I was used to, at least from mixing Tamiya 50:50 with thinner, so you have to use lower pressure and paint closer to keep it from splatting out. Being so thin, you have to work up color in passes, which is good or bad, depending.
The insignia masks are from Miracle Masks. The other day I reached out to Mel with a technical question about masks for my next project, but he says he’s not doing custom masks anymore. This is a bummer. Does anyone know a good source for custom masks?
I really don’t want to use decals, so I’m going to try Maketar masks, using an assortment of roundels and code letters/numbers, but I liked how I could get odd shaped characters for the ID number.
Here with the white elements painted, but not yet the insignia blue. I really like the painted roundels so much better than decals.
May-June
All glossed up with the popular floor care product, getting ready for weathering.
The upper landing gear struts as rendered in the kit are a bit impressionistic. I scratch built new with brass rod and styrene. These aren’t perfect, but are a bit closer to the prototype. Again, this is as much for learning as making an impact with the finished work.
July
A work trip to London and a family vacation in Wyoming pretty much took care of July.
August
Panel line wash. I used Windsor Oils Lamp Black thinned in mineral spirits. There’s something about the purpose developed weathering products that kind of rubs me the wrong way. I’m sure they’re amazing. Maybe I’m just old fashioned. Or maybe I’d be more open to them if I felt like I had mastery of the process.
I also just love the smell of oil paints and mineral spirits. My dad is a professional fine artist, and so I grew up with those smells.
Note the faded ailerons. All the fabric surfaces got that treatment, which I did by mixing MRP Sky Grey into the Blue Grey, approx 40/60 and then trying to barely mist it.
As to verisimilitude, I have a reference showing an F4F with radically faded fabric surfaces. My rationale in this case has a little back story: my grandfather was part of an advance echelon of VMF-121, arriving on Guadalcanal on 25 September, 1942, and flying with VMF-223 and VMF-224. The rest of VMF-121 arrived in New Caledonia on 29 September and then onto Cactus in October.
My intention is to show this aircraft as it would have appeared on the morning of November 7 (the day he ditched this plane off of Malaita after strafing a Japanese destroyer). So the great likelihood is that, by that time, it had been in theatre—either in combat if it came with my grandfather’s group, or in training if it came with the rest of the squadron—for at least 6 weeks. The average duty life of an F4F on Guadalcanal in the fall of 1942 was maybe two weeks, so this would have been a comparatively seasoned aircraft.
(Of course, it’s just as likely that this aircraft was a reinforcement, and could have been fresh out of the factory and dropped off the day before.)
And the bottom. Trying to bring out all that lovely rivet detail.
Dot filters. Again, I used oil paints. Anyone who’s ever done a dot filter will note that the yellow is going to make the blue look green. Oops.
When planning a filter, have a look at a color wheel and give some thought as to how you want to shape the color. It’s not just about modulation for it’s own sake, but in modulating for a particular effect. The brown, white, and grey all looked good, but I went through most of a box of q-tips getting rid of the greenish-yellow.
Engine details peek out of the of the cowling.
Pause for a work trip to Africa…
September
Just as I was putting final touches, a small sorting box fell on it, breaking both antenna posts and knocking off the canopy and windscreen.
Instead of trying to repair the plastic parts and always worry about them breaking, I decided to fabricate new with brass, by taking rod with the diameter a little bigger than the widest point of the post and filing down. This worked pretty well, and was easier than it sounds. The main post is epoxied to the bottom of the fuselage and then then hole is filled with milliput. For the small post on the tail, once I had it shaped, I chucked it into a cordless drill, and kind of crudely ‘lathed’ a pin for it to insert into the plastic. Then I faired that in with Milliput.
Fixing the paint job was a pain—there’s maybe 8 steps: basic camo, acrylic gloss, oil panel line, acrylic gloss, oil filter, dull coat, dry pigment, dull coat. A lot of these need to dry overnight before moving on to the next step, so working a few nights a week it took over two weeks to get back to zero.
As long as I was here, I decided to take another pass at the windscreen, trying to get the lines tighter and crisper. Someday I’m going to rule a masking canopies. My first pass was with Montex masks. They didn’t really fit all well, but that’s probably more to do with the canopy being a Squadron vac canopy instead of the kit part.
I have really mixed feelings about commercial canopy masks. On the one hand, I see how they save a lot of time. On the other, I think masking a canopy is kind of a fundamental skill. Maybe once I’ve mastered doing it, I’ll feel better about taking shortcuts.
It’s a mix of regular and bendy Tamiya tape. I punched the curved bar at the top of the front panel with the appropriate sized Micro Mark punch and then filled in the straightaways. To do inside and out took a night and a half.
Pause there for another trip to Africa, but I’m almost done. Really.
Thanks for looking (and making it through this absurdly long post!).
-J