Landlubber Mike

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 👍

Fantastic diorama - feel like you’re right in the middle of the scene. Well done!

That's coming along really nicely. Your planking is pristine - well done!

Here's where I am today. I've been trying to figure out the best order to build and paint these. This particular destroyer has parts of its deck in linoleum, which makes painting a lot trickier. I've painted the linoleum sections, and then spent a few hours cutting up Tamiya paint mask tape into tiny pieces on the order of a couple of millimeters to mask it for when I paint the steel sections. Probably a good two hours of work to mask about two square inches of deck 😳 The trickiest thing at this scale is the PE - this stuff is so thin in sections I swear you can breathe on it and it will bend. I need to straighten out the main tower, but after bumping it accidentally a few times, I don't want to keep fixing it because over time the pieces will just snap. So, it's a little bent at the moment. All in all though it's been fun and I've gotten a lot of experience with working with PE, gluing it, using my airbrush, etc. that when I go to 1/350, I should be in good shape.

I've been working on this off and on for a few months now. Here are some build pictures: Bridge Funnel - in second picture, can see how much improved parts look with PE given that the plastic tends to be way over scale (especially at 1/700) Rear gun platform - those little triangles were added underneath as supports!