1/48 Academy F4U-1A - "Jolly Rogers" Ira C. Kepford, Papua New Guinea, 1944
The man- Ira C. Kepford shot down 16 enemy aircraft in 76 days flying with VF-17 Jolly Rogers.
The model, well, I thought, Academy, it won't be bad, they do some good stuff, but after having some nasty fit issues whilst building this, I looked it up on Scalemates, and this is a re-box from 1976. a company named Otaki (never heard of them). This is the box art.
So my advice, if you are looking at getting it, don't, there are better F4U's out there. If you have it, bin the decals, they are extremely bad, (thanks to my spares again). The wing intake coolers and guns are inserts, and they are bad fits, so be prepared for some serious sanding, filling and re-scribing. This is far from my best work, so I tried some different things with it on the weathering side, I won't bore you with the details, those who see my builds will tell the differences to my normal.
I used Mission Models Intermediate Blue & Gloss Sea Blue on the camo (again I will say, Mission Models is great paint, it will spray straight from the bottle, but I like spraying really thin paint, so I put around 2 drops of their thinner to 8 drops of paint, this lets me build up layers for my pre-shading to show through. I have used Mission Models on quite a few builds now, and the thinners bottle is still near full.)
Other paints used, the usual, Tamiya, Gunze, Vallejo Metal Colours, Flory dark dirt wash, several coats of Gunze Super Gloss Clear III throughout the build and Vallejo Matte Varnish for final coat.
