Landlubber Mike

So I spent some time the last couple of nights working on the cockpit details. The cockpit pieces from the kit are actually nicely done, but I decided to try out the Eduard PE set, about 2/3 of which is dedicated to cockpit details. I have a set for each of the two models. One set is brass colored, while the other is more of a stainless steel color. The latter seems a lot stiffer to work than the brass colored one. The PE set has 54 PE pieces, and another four "film" decal-type applications for cockpit gauges and the like (I'm not sure if these are stickers, decals, or some other type of application). The PE set unfortunately is discontinued, but you can find them on eBay here and there. Here is the instruction sheet on the Eduard site: https://www.eduard.com/out/media/48317.pdf First I worked on the pilot's seat - the PE is a bit crisper and finer than the kit piece (mostly with the back rails), but I think the kit holds its own and likely any improvements won't necessarily be apparent in a busy cockpit. I'll add the seatbelt after these get painted. Looking at the pictures, looks like I need to touch up the corners a bit. Also included is my giant dime for scale 🙈 Here are pictures of one of the armrest consoles. The kit one is ok I suppose, as the details likely won't be readily apparent. The Eduards PE though really goes all out. I believe close to a dozen parts were used for it. These were fun to put together. It took me a bit of time to figure out how to read the Eduard instructions, but now that I understand how they are drafted, I can say that they are well done. The two above are the two stand-alone pieces from the PE set. The rest of the cockpit portion of the set requires modifications to kit parts. Probably only 1/3 of the way done so far. Here are some pictures of the real thing - the Eduards PE looks spot on! These planes were not for the claustrophobic, and those metal bucket seats don't look all that comfortable. The kit says to paint the interior and the exterior "aluminum" but these pictures give me ideas on how to use different tones to bring out the details. My order of Vallejo "Metal Color" paints just arrived and I'm glad I ordered different shades of the various "aluminum" colors. Edit: Not sure if the picture below is from the F3F series, but probably from a similar aircraft:

Hello Martin! Congrats on the new house and upcoming move! Good luck with everything - glad to see your Fly and Rattlesnake making the trip with you

They look better than a lot of the resin upgrade sets from years ago.

Wow, the detail on those parts is stunning. Very nice!

Nice! For the black and white stripes, are you going to paint or use decals?

Craig you're killing me. When I went into plastic ships, I said that would be it. Then I added planes and said no way would I add cars. Fast forward and I have a ton of car kits, so I've said I'm not going to build armor. I'm of course going to follow your build, but I'm sending my wife your way to explain when armor kits start showing up on the doorstep 🤐

Indeed! Really fantastic work there OC. Way to stick with it - I think a lot of us would have called it a day, but you hung in there and created a beautiful model. Well deserved congratulations!

Nice work Grant, and you too Rick! I have this kit, but am a few kits away from getting the experience and confidence to do this kit justice. Your models are very inspirational though!

Thanks guys! Mark, I think 1/32 is about as far as I’ll go when it comes to planes 👍

After building the Accurate Miniatures F4B-4 and P-6E, I'm building the Grumman F3F-1 and F3F-2 by Accurate Miniatures. Bottom box art: Reference material: Deliveries of the F3F-1 began in 1936, and the F3F-2 was delivered in 1937-1938. I don't believe that they saw action in WWII, as they were replaced by other, newer planes (the rate of development/improvement in war aviation was very impressive during this time). They ended up being used more for training aircraft than anything. Very cool looking planes continuing the colorful "yellow wing" line of aircraft. I have to say that the Accurate Miniature kit looks very well done. While I believe the F4B-4 and P-6E were reboxings of earlier Monogram kits, the F3F-1 and F3F-2 might have been developed in house. Sprues look very clean, decals are crisp, and the instruction manual is very detailed. The kit also includes a small fret of PE for rigging and the bomb rack. If the kit builds as nicely as it looks in the first impressions, I have to say that it's really a shame AM is no longer in business. Here is the aftermarket I'm planning to use (have a second set for the F3F-2): The Eduard PE set is mostly for the cockpit, but there are a few pieces for the undercarriage and bomb and bomb rack assemblies. I'm not sure if I'm going to use the Yellow Wings decals though. The question that really bedeviled me with the F4B-4 was can I match the nose color with the fuselage band and wing chevron? Same issue here, as you will have to paint the nose to match the colors. The nice thing about the AM decals, however, is that they assume you will just paint everything yourself! I thought about doing that with the F4B-4, but the fuselage band and chevron had very narrow black (or white) stripe borders -- impossible to replicate. The AM kit gives you very narrow black and white line decals to allow you to add the borders yourself. If I go that route, I might even try to paint the US insignias on the wings as the Montex masks give you stencils to do so. I'm digging the larger scale - hopefully a lot easier to handle than the 1/72 scale kits I just completed. I'm also going to try a different strategy on painting and assembly. With the F4B-4 and P-6E, there were slight fit issues so I needed to use putty in some areas to fill gaps. I decided to assemble the fuselage with the lower wing and tail in place, and then tape off areas to paint, which was a real pain I'm hoping that I can paint the fuselage, wings, and tail separately, and then assemble them to avoid having to go through the taping process. Fingers crossed that the fit is good! I haven't decided on colors yet, but I'm planning to paint the aluminum areas using Vallejo's "Metal Color" line which is their answer to Alclad. We'll see how that goes. For the yellow wing top, I'm going with Tamiya's "camel yellow" but this time will use the correct one (the TS line) and not the line for polycarbonate RC planes (the PS line). Should be fun kits! If not, hopefully my (mis)adventures will at least provide comedic relief to you all.

Wow, that's looking amazing - very nicely done!

Love your work Joe - very nicely done! Love the color scheme and markings.

Looking great Craig. I like these work horse types of vehicles.

That's coming along really nicely - well done!

Well thank you Lou - my wife appreciates it I have to be careful as I'm running out of stash room. Need to get going on working the stash down 🥴 Not sure I can see it that well either Egilman - lots of close up work with the Optivisor. I found I need to take breaks on working on it so I don't get cross eyed or have a neck ache.

Lou, a collection of yellow wings would be fun. Not sure how many I'll build after these two (and possibly the Dauntless), but something to keep in mind. On the F3F kits I'm about to start, I bought some aftermarket decals for the chevrons, etc. The tricky thing with adding stripe and other decals is what do you do with other areas that have to be painted the same color but there are no decals for the section? Sometimes painting all sections and not using decals might work, but for some of the colored stripes, there might be a very thin black and/or white border which is impossible to replicate by paint. All things to plan in advance I'm going to have to keep an eye out for the JRS-1 - what a cool looking plane! The kit is discontinued unfortunately, and the one on eBay is going for $130 😳 Will have to be patient to find one at the right price. So the Fletcher class destroyers look fantastic - some fun PE kits are available: I have about 10 more ships in this scale in the stash. Not all ships in this scale have upgrade sets unfortunately, so I selectively picked the ones for my stash that had full PE upgrade sets (and decks where available). Half of those are auxiliary class ships which are on the simpler end of things. The goal is to get enough experience so that I can start on the 3-deck Akagi IJN aircraft carrier from Hasegawa and the ISE carrier battleship from Fujimi (see below). Depending on how these models turn out, I'll likely put them into some kind of diorama setting since they typically are waterline models at this scale.

Really nice work. Having done two planes in 1/72, I know how hard it is. You're making it look a lot easier than it is

Very cool work - your dioramas are very lifelike. Great creativity!

Very nice job! What did you think of the fit of the kit? I like the WWI era subjects a lot, and have heard that Roden can be tricky. My guess is that Eduard does a better job.

Wow, that was fast. I need to stop looking at different subjects - I've moved from ships into planes and cars, can't add more These Star Wars and similar genre kits look like a lot of fun though.

That's some really awesome work on what sounds like a tough kit. I love the Apache and remember wanting to build one as a kid. It has a real badass look to it. I almost bid on the Hasegawa kit with this Israeli conversion kit last week but it went for $$$.

Very cool! My kids would love this!

You do really beautiful work - can't believe I missed these logs. Really nice job!

Beautiful model Ernie! That plane looks like a long needle!

Wow looks fantastic! Will have to add that one to the stash 👍