FM-2

Thanks again.

That is great work to convert that Tamiya F4F to an FM-2 Wildcat. The paint job is fantastic.

Nice build!

One factor in the Pacific was the decline in quality of Japanese pilots. The US assigned successful pilots to instruction roles after a short time. Japan used it's naval aviators until they were killed.

But the F4F was a very capable aircraft, if a little funny looking. And a lot were deployed. The USN had a lot of CVE's, and the later classes could operate a couple of dozen aircraft.

Glad to see you finally wrangled this kit to the finish line. You did a bang-up job, especially on the subject matter of an Atlantic Theatre fighter. I feel like I haven’t seen much in the way of carrier operations stories/info from the US side in the Atlantic. 

In summary, very cool modification and excellent paint scheme. Thanks for sharing!

Thanks for all the nice comments, everyone.

Jay Jay, the FM-2 version of the Wildcat came in service after the F6F and I don't really understand why it's numbers are better than the F6F as assuredly the F6F was the more capable fighter.  It may well be that over the same time spans, say the last 6 months of the war, that the F6F results were the same or better than the FM-2.

John 3:16, the Monogram kit is an F4F-4.

Quick Wildcat question:

Does anyone know what specific variant the Monogram Wildcat depicts?F4F-3, F4F-4, etc......?

yes very well done !! you gotta like that camo.

That's beautiful. Thanks for taking us along. Very nice looking build.

BK

Looks good, John. Thanks for sharing your WIP.

Sure turned out nice John.  Big fan of the Atlantic scheme. 

Finally got the FM-2 finished.  Worked out OK, but I just had some trouble getting to the bench.  At the last I had an issue with the landing gear doors down there on the bottom.  A Tamiya part that doesn't fit?  Had to be my fault but I sure can't figure out how.   A little weathering, not too much.  Model Master paints, dark gull gray on top, insignia white under the flying surfaces, and gloss white on the fuselage.  Alclad flat coat, not too much on the gloss white portions.  I had Techmod decals, the larger ones worked fine, but the stencils rolled up on themselves, and rather than fight them I made new stencils with a color laser printer.  Better resolution than the Techmod stencils.  A few on the left side need more attention but I fixed them with Mr. Mark Softer after the pictures were taken.  To lazy to reshoot..

On to the pictures!

That looks great

Interesting conversion, John. 

Appears to have needed more work than one would first expect and you're doing very well with it.

Wow that’s cool looking build 

Looking very impressive, John.

A little more progress on the FM-2.  A lot of white, the bottom of the flight surfaces are flat insignia white, which at this point is still gloss because there is no flat insignia white in my stocks.  The fuselage sides are to be gloss white, but are still flat white at this point.  The clear coats will take care of that.  The topsides are dark gull grey.  For the first time I used clay rolls to mask that little dark gull grey in front of the tail.  I may yet finish this project.

I will try to thin down the cowl around the exhaust some more.  Have to do it with an Exacto knife at this point.

The start of this somehow slipped by me, but I'm glad I caught it now.

Great project, John, and certainly beats a similar project I tried with the old Monogram kit (and without the nice resin) some, er...decades ago. Looking forward to seeing it in its 'Atlantic' colors!

Really nice surgery there John!

Thatsn some very nice work tehre John. I have never heard of the FM-2 version of the Wildcat, nice to see somthing new.

What a fun build to watch! Very nice John. =] I always enjoy conversions and puzzle planes coming together on the forum. I've heard about the KMC conversion but never saw it in action. Glad you're giving it a go.

Glad to see you're not using the kit engine. Good for you. The Wright R-1820 was a single row engine which incidently caused the cowl to be a little shorter. Not sure how much difference that's making at 1:48 scale. Can't be more than a few millimeters. It's pretty cool to see KMC included the waffle shaped intakes between the cylinders. All of that is coming out quite nicely. I would suggest sanding down the trailing edge of the cowl flaps to bring them closer to scale if it's not too late to do so.

So happy to see this variant on the forum. Can't wait to see the rest. =]

That's coming along really nicely John

I'm sure you've seen this link, I've always found it to be pretty reliable.

http://www.angelfire.com/dc/jinxx1/Wildcat/F4FColors.html

That’s quite a project that you have started there! 

Hi, Bill.  Gonna do it in the Atlantic scheme.

I just happened to have read this morning that it had a kill to loss ratio of 35:1.  Quite remarkable.  Possibly because it went against poorer trained Japanese pilots late in the war, or more encounters with bombers, but still almost twice that ratio of the next best.  Maybe we should be building FM-2's instead of F-35's?

That's quite a nice project. Wasn't the FM-2 the most successful fighter aircraft in WW2?

What's the markings plan?

I'm watching this one.