[Yet Another] Tamiya 1:48 F4U-1A WIP

Really working hard on a detail no one will see? Why that's called modeling! And you've taken great photos, so people do see it! 

Good to see you're having fun with the details. It's easy to get bogged down and frustrated sometimes, and at that point why do it? But you're making it look easy and enjoyable, so good on ya!

Thanks RadMax.

The oxygen bottle was really fun for me, even if it's a bit silly.

Once I decided the molded kit detail wouldn't do, working out how to do it better was instructive. Doing something just for the lesson is worth it to me at this point. That's an attitude i probably inherited from my grandfather so it seems appropriate to the spirit of this homage.

But you’ll kind of be able to see it—it’ll help the cockpit look busy.

-J

Engine!

While things percolate on the cockpit, let’s start on the engine. 

The kit engine is okay, if a little spartan, so I’m using the Quickboost. First, X-1, glossy black as a primer.

Alclad aluminum. With the Wildcat, I dry brushed silver over black. This time I wanted to try getting a metallic base coat, and then use a wash to bring out the detail.

The detail on Quickboost engines are great, but the ‘quick’ part isn’t completely accurate because you have to add a few details, including the push rods, and the ignition ring and harness. None of this is all that hard, but it does take patience.

We’ll start with the push rods. 

I had pre-sprayed a length of .020 Evergreen rod XF-1. Twenty thousandths is just under a scale inch. I haven’t been able to find good dimensional drawings, but the pushrods in reference images look a little chunkier—maybe an inch and half in diameter—but .030 (1.44 inches) looks too thick to me, and I’d rather be a touch under scale than over. To get the length, I roughed in with a divider, test fit and carefully trimmed until it was right. Some of the cylinders are longer than others, but this puts me in the ballpark. Using calipers, I measured my test sample.

I got this tip from Paul Budzik. Basically, if you add a length of strip styrene on one side, terminating right at the blade, it makes it really easy to transfer your cut dimension to the guard. You just insert your measuring tool flush to the strip, and then slide the guard to mate on the other side, and that’s your cut dimension.

Chopping 18 perfectly sized rods is now a breeze. At the top of the photo you can see a better shot of the styrene strip.

To position, I used blu tack on a toothpick. On this build, blu tack is becoming more and more essential. Once placed, thin CA with a glue Looper locks it in, starting at the base of the gear reduction housing, because any slop will be hidden by the ignition ring. Add a little dab of CA on the underside of the push rod where it joins the cylinder block to complete. Once you get going, it doesn’t take that long to do the whole row. Happily, the bottom row doesn’t have provisions for push rods, and you’d never see them, so never mind.

Done! Handling the rods means a few touch ups, but NBD.

I have a few ideas for how to approach the ignition ring that might be interesting. I’m trying to decide between whether to represent the earlier tubular ring (as seen in the squadron portrait in the first post of this thread) or the later squared off ring. 

More soon. Thanks for looking.

-J

One more mini-update en route before the holiday...

Washes!  

I really hate making things glossy—it just looks wrong to me when we’re talking about a fighter plane. But I really love what washes on a glossy surface can do, so I grin and bear. That cowl ring, for instance, even with that awful glare, has so much definition now. 

This time I tried using Tamiya X22 gloss, instead of Future because I didn’t want to have to wait 24 hours to apply the wash. I let the Tamiya gloss set for a few hours, and then went in.

I’m a bit old school, I guess, in that I’m using oil paints and mineral spirits instead of purpose produced products for washes. I’m completely prepared to believe that they’re easier to use, but there’s something about concocting it yourself that appeals to me. 

The chair finally made it onto the bulkhead. There isn’t a lot of surface area on the attachment points, so I used five minute epoxy for a stronger joint. While it’s a debatable use of effort, I think the tubular framework represents the real thing a lot better, and will be at least somewhat visible in the end. This will look a lot better with highlights picked out, matte, and with seatbelt.

Sidewall. Kit detail appended with solder and stretched sprue wiring. I was going to scrape all this out and scratch build new with a little more depth and fidelity, in the case of the boxes, and a slightly lighter touch, in the case of spars, but sense got ahold of me. 

And the other side. The kit detail on the throttle box is a bit rudimentary, so I scratch built new. It’s still a little under-detailed because there should be three levers rather than just one. I might revisit. The placards are from aeroscale. I left the ejector pin mark because it will be hidden by the console. 

I’m almost ready to finally get the cockpit pulled together. At the very least, I can’t wait for everything to get back to matte. 

Happy Thanksgiving! At least, to everyone stateside… Happy Random Thursday in November! to everyone else.

Thanks for looking.

-J

I don't know how I missed you starting this kit.  You are very fortunate to have such great information on your Grandfather.  He sounds like quite the character.

I know you said you hadn't put a kit together in 30 years until the F4F, but the level of skill is inspiring.  Thanks for posting a detailed WIP.  I will be watching with keen interest.

Looking good, John! The gloss coat phase is always a bizarre one when modeling well-used subjects, but it's worthwhile in the end!

You may want to check the color of the gearbox on the front of the engine. Those were usually painted some type of gray on these old radials. I only bring that up because everything else is so detailed!

Overall, how would you rate the quality of the Quickboost engine? I've got a couple in the stash (something you may start learning about soon haha) but I've not had a chance to work with them. I like your technique for sizing the pushrods. 

ManCityFan, thanks so much—that's really kind of you to say. That F4F did end up taking over a year and a few tries (starting from zero), so it's not entirely fair for me to say the finished version was my first kit in 30 years, per se. At the onset it was, but by the end, maybe not so much.

And yes, he really was a character. 

-J

RadMax

Thanks. And yes, the gearbox! I should have called out that I haven't actually painted it yet—it's got glossy black for primer, and then overspray, basically, from the cylinders.

The order of events, based on my experience doing the Quickboost for the F4F is: cylinders and pushrods -> ignition ring -> detail and paint the gearbox. The harness can happen at anytime after the ring.

The reason being, adding the magneto and distributers to the gearbox makes fitting the ignition ring hard (maybe impossible, depending) and they will very likely need filling to get them to sit perfectly, so I'd have to go back and repaint anyway. 

I really like the Quickboost a lot. Because the detail trails off at the back, it's not meant to be seen from the sides, so would not be a good candidate if you intend to remove access panels, etc. Conversely, it doesn't require any surgery to get it to fit, and seen from the front it's a substantial step up from the kit parts. And if you're going to the trouble to detail and add a harness anyway—literally hours of work—adding a $10 part seems like a small cost to amplify the dividends of that labor. 

Cheers

-J

John,

I should have known better. I just figured since you did the wash and all... you know what they say about assumptions 

Good scouting report on the engines. Looking forward to my next radial now!

Max

Looking cool. Really impressed with the new oxygen bottle.

Max, not at all. I appreciate the interest and feedback. I’m using the WIP to help me organize my own thinking, and also to invite technical input (soldering, for instance) so those comments are always welcome.

Rudy, thanks much. Semper fi.

Chris, thanks. That was (oddly) fun to do. 

-J

A great back story to a great build,one of the better wip I've seen in these forums.

templar1099: Sorry for the delay--I wasn't minding the store... thanks so much, thanks very kind of you to say.

I was hoping to make more progress, but… real life. 

Because the cockpit is a bit murky in the shadows, details benefit from exaggerated contrast so they don’t get lost. It’s time to pull out highlights and push shadows. For this let’s try oil paints. I have a starter set of Windsor and Newton oils. It wasn’t very expensive and should last a really long time. The one thing is, you have to be comfortable mixing colors. 

With a little color theory, it’s really not that hard. In this case, we want shades of interior green. Start with yellow. If we were going to be purists about it, we’d just add in black until we got the right shade, because that’s how Vought painted theirs, but I had mixed the original interior green per Tamiya’s instructions, with XF-3 Yellow, and XF-5 Green, so yellow and black is a bit unsaturated in comparison.  

I squeezed as little paint out of the tubes as I could, and this is way more paint than I’ll be able to use, but that’s okay. There’s a variety of shades to draw from: darker on the right, middling on the left, and highlights up top.

After brushing highlights and shadows. Basically edges and anything facing up gets highlights, and anything that would be in shadow gets a slightly darker shade. Don’t worry about matching the base color exactly—the whole reason why we’re using oils is because they’re so easy to blend. Just take a clean brush, gently brush in the base color, and the seam disappears, and you’re left with a slightly 3D effect.

Onto the seat belts. I’m using FineMolds plastic belts. You have to order them from Japan, and they’re kind of expensive ($15 for a set of four), but they are easy to shape and really detailed on both sides.

Part of my original ‘vision’ for this model was I wanted to have one of the shoulder straps twisted, and for them to generally look haphazardly left by the previous pilot. 

I’ve started weathering, and the seat is a little too scratched and the belts a little too dirty. I’ll go back and clean that up a bit.

The famous oxygen bottle in his new home. 

I had done a lovely map case with oils that goes on the side of the console in that great gaping black area, but it popped off while test fitting with back bulkhead/seat assembly and seems to have vanished. Hopefully it will turn up later, or maybe I’ll scratch a new one up.

Placards from Aeroscale really help bring life to the cockpit. 

There’s these funny protrusions sticking out on the lower left instrument panel which are meant to be connected to the throttle. I cut them off and drilled out with my new little drill press.

Later, when the main cockpit assembly is in the fuselage, I’ll fit wires in to connect to the throttle, which is attached to the sidewall.

Instrument panels on. It’s almost starting to look like something, though in the cruelty of macro photography, it looks like the IP backing film is a bit low on the left side. I glued with a couple dots of white glue, so maybe there’s a way to fix it without mangling anything.

That’s it for now, thanks for looking.

-J

It's coming along really nicely. Like the shade/highlight concept. Might give it a go on one of mine. Very impressive all round

Thanks Chris. Give it a go... it's really not as hard as I thought it would be.

-J

Thanks lawdog. 

Apparently, when I said "I’ll go back and clean that up a bit", what I meant was "take two steps back." The other morning I had a few minutes and thought "I'll just go in and knock that out..." (Spoiler alert! Bad idea!) 

As I was touching it up, I started trying to clean up an errant blob of CA, and a poorly executed repair on the support pole, and just started making things worse, eventually breaking one of the shoulder harnesses in a way that will be hard to cover. I was able to save the lap belts, so that's something.

Luckily, Ultracast seats come in twos, and I had another set of shoulder harnesses left over. Naturally I had to 'correct' the cross bar on the support, which should sit at the back of the junction fixture, not in the middle as molded. I cut it out, filed out groves, and then CA'd a length of 0.020" styrene rod. 

I should have it back to zero—except hopefully better than before—soon.

Thanks for looking.

-J

ChrisJH666

Doh!

Amazing work all around!  Looking forward to the finish.

Your friend, Toshi

Thanks Toshi!

Quick update on the seat. 

I've just put on the gloss coat to prep for a wash, so everything looks awful, but behind that there's some issues that are going to be tricky. There's a bit of a blob of CA next to the right harness, and both harnesses have stress breaks below the bar, right at the top the seat. The right harness is also riding a little high on the bar. I really want that harness to twist, but this isn't really reading right to me yet--it was better before. The lap belts also look a little stiff at the bend on the seat walls.

It's not terrible, exactly, but it's also a bit hard to picture this really fooling anyone. I really want those belts to look strewn (in a respectful way), and held down by gravity, not super glue. 

I was hoping to wrap up the cockpit before moving on to other sub-assemblies in earnest, but maybe it's time to focus elsewhere and come back later (or not).

Cheers

-J

Hello all

It came to my attention on another forum that the Quickboost engine is under-scale, so I measured. It’s a little over 9 scale inches—or 17%—short. That’s more like 1/58th scale than 1/48. I’m not all that fussy about ‘to the rivet’ accuracy, but that’s a bit too much for me. 

As long as I was measuring, I compared to the kit engine and an R2800 resin set from Verlinden I inherited in an eBay transaction. (I used the included fronts to measure, what with the full engine being hard to accurately measure unassembled.)

It turns out none of them are right:

• Quickboost: .912" which is equivalent to 43.77 scale inches
• Tamiya: .980" is a little over 47 scale inches
• Verlinden is the closest, at 1.055", or 50.64 scale inches. 

I had some thoughts about using the Verlinden, but despite being closer to scale, it’s really not much of a step up from the Tamiya—the molded in push rods kind of ruin it for me.  

I have a Vector set on the way, and am switching gears to the wheel wells while I wait. I have maybe one more bench session before travelling for the holidays anyway, so there’s plenty of time for deliveries before I’m actually hung up on this.

Cheers

-J

Happy New Year, everyone. I hope 2018 brings good tidings. 

I’ve mostly been away for the holidays, but did manage to sneak in a little bench time over the last couple of days. 

First up, the seat belts. I had ordered a set of HGW belts almost as a lark, not expecting them to arrive before I had gotten the seat with the Fine Molds cleaned up, but rather as something to consider for a future build, but when the arrived, I got more intrigued.

This is a terrible photo, but hopefully gets the gist across. It’s a sheet with the textile portion of the belts printed onto a kind of textured film, and then a fret of PE hardware. Cutting out the belts isn’t hard—I squared the sheet onto a sheet of acrylic, and then used a thin beam square to guide the cuts. To assemble, you ‘simply’ thread the the textile pieces through the hardware, and then glue in place with PVA glue (apparently CA will melt the film). It’s not actually all that hard once you get in the swing of it, but it is slow, fussy work. 

Each belt is made up of four textile pieces. The shoulder harnesses each use two PE parts, plus another for the backing brace. The lap belts use three PE parts, plus one more for the latch. Altogether it’s 29 parts. For seat belts. It took me a couple hours to get them fully assembled. 

But man, it just looks right. The one drag is I couldn’t flip the one shoulder harness like I wanted to because there’s no backing detail. I suppose you might be able to sandwich another piece of textile on the reverse side, and then scratch the back of the buckle, but I’ve had enough experimentation with this seat for this build.

On to the wheel wells.  

The Tamiya kit offers rudimentary detailing, with the hydraulic cylinders and a simplified junction box. We could just weave in wiring around them, maybe drill out the cylinders to add the piston rods, but what would the fun be with that?

Instead, I scraped out the detailing, including the ribbing, with a Mission Models Micro Chisel (super useful tool) and a file. 

I

I added back the ribbing with .020 x .010” styrene strip. For the junction, I took 0.020” rod and carefully glued it in an arrangement roughly approximating the prototype, with two bars, a spacer, and then a third bar. 

I also scraped out four ribs on the interior sidewall and CA’d on a bit of wine bottle foil for the canvas access hatch. You can’t really tell in this pic, but I embossed dots around the ring to simulate buttons.

At this point, I added the outside sidewalls. These don’t normally get added until you add the outer wings, but as far as I can tell, you can add at this point. The alignment is critical to getting the seam between the outer sidewall and the top, so I wanted to do when I had the most control and the fewest moving parts.

For the hydraulic cylinders, I used nested Albion aluminum tubing with thin strips of furnace tape (basically thick foil with adhesive backing—it comes in a roll like duct tape that will last a modeler literally forever) and then wire for the piston. 

Now we’re about back to where Tamiya left us, but with a little more clarity in the detail.

Most of the various conduit and wires added, except for the hydraulic lines to the cylinders, which will come in next. At the moment it looks a bit of a dog’s breakfast, but these runs are on the real thing as well. Once everything is the same color, and I get those main hydraulic lines in, in front, it should start to pull together.

I also finally assembled the cockpit—this felt a bit momentous to me. Before buttoning it up, I did fix the registration of the instruments in the panel. To affix the panel face back on on the instrument film, instead of using PVA glue this time, I painted the front of the film with Future. 

Reverse view, showing off the ‘famous’ belts.

I might actually start thinking about getting the fuselage together, though it might make more sense to wait until the engine is built, in case there’s any heavy modification required to get the engine installed. Speaking of, the Vector R-2800 is a project all on it’s own, but that's for another day. At least its close to scale. 

That’s it for now. Thanks for looking. 

Wow.....beautiful.

Wow!  I wish I had your paitence and determination.  That looks stunning!

Those seatbelts are the cat’s pajamas. Not to mention the detail in the gear bay is looking great. I need to up my game, I think!

Happy New Year to you, as well!

This is amazing, detail galore!

Your friend, Toshi

leemitcheltree: thanks!

Keyda81: I reckon I'm a glutton, I guess, though I think I might soon find my limits to both. :)

RadMax8: Thanks! Those wheel wells are starting to make me a bit twitchy... 

Toshi: Thanks much, my friend. 

Speaking of twitchy, once I get the wheel bays squared away, then it's back to the engine. And because that beautiful Quickboost R-2800, with only two resin parts, is halfway to 1/72 scale, we're going with the Vector. It's definitely overkill for a closed cowl, but seems like the best of the available options. And man, that's some lovely detail.

I need to get it assembled before I close up the fuselage to make sure I have a clear plan of how to install in the event I need to chop up the fuselage (anyone done this before? Tips/advice welcome!). 

I feel like things are about to start getting real, but I can't back down now.

Yikes!

-J

Johnny1000

leemitcheltree: thanks!

Keyda81: I reckon I'm a glutton, I guess, though I think I might soon find my limits to both. :)

RadMax8: Thanks! Those wheel wells are starting to make me a bit twitchy... 

Toshi: Thanks much, my friend. 

Speaking of twitchy, once I get the wheel bays squared away, then it's back to the engine. And because that beautiful Quickboost R-2800, with only two resin parts, is halfway to 1/72 scale, we're going with the Vector. It's definitely overkill for a closed cowl, but seems like the best of the available options. And man, that's some lovely detail.

I need to get it assembled before I close up the fuselage to make sure I have a clear plan of how to install in the event I need to chop up the fuselage (anyone done this before? Tips/advice welcome!). 

I feel like things are about to start getting real, but I can't back down now.

Yikes!

-J

 

Your friend, Toshi