F4U-1A Corsair in 1/72

[Guest]

I’ve gone on a bit of a favourite aircraft modelling trip at the moment … After finishing the BAC Lightning (well, it still needs paint) I’ve started on a Tamiya 1/72 F4U-1A Corsair.

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Here’s what you get in the kit:

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I’d never built (or even looked into the box of) a 1/72 Tamiya aircraft kit before, but these parts look really good. Once I started building it, that impression only improved. Here’s the cockpit., for example:

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I don’t build many aircraft, but this is more detail than I’d ever seen in an aircraft model this scale, and more than I’ve seen in most of the 1/48 scale ones I built a long time ago. The seat is a separate part from the back plate, the rudder pedals are a separate part, as are the two troughs below them, and the stick with its linkages needs to be added as well. (The rod running backward broke off later when I test-fitted the front and back sections of the cockpit; I managed to glue it back on, but it broke again when I was painting it and flew off somewhere — I haven’t found it yet.)

With some paint on, it looks like this:

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I painted it medium green with a dark green wash and light green drybrushing to bring out the details. The instrument panels etc. are black with some grey drybrushing. There’s a decal for the instrument panel, oddly enough covering up all the moulded-in dials, and for the seatbelts, plus a clear part for the gunsight — though most of it has to be painted black, and that means the clear bit at the top appears black as well. Fit the sight after applying the decal, by the way: it goes through a hole in that.

The insides of the fuselage are a bit garish:

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Tamiya’s instructions simply tell you to paint all interior areas the same green (a mixture of their green and yellow), but I found on the IPMS Stockholm site that the F4U-1 and early -1A aircraft had the cockpit painted green, but most other interior areas in a colour called “salmon” which was apparently a reddish orange. So, orange with a red wash it was. Similarly, Tamiya says to paint the inside of the engine cowling, the rear parts of the wheel wells, and the insides of the wheel well doors green too, but that site says all these were white (other than the tail wheel doors), so that’s what mine will end up as. I should’ve painted the forward parts of the main wheel wells before glueing the wing halves together, but I forgot, hence the orange paint on the undersides of the wings

[colin m]

A brilliant looking aircraft. Quite unique. I was lucky enough to build Tamiya's 1:32 version recently. Anyway, you're off to a good start here, there's some nice detail in this little 1:72 kit.

[flyjoe180]

Nice start on your Corsair there Jakko

[Mickc1440]

Nice work so far Jakko

[Guest]

Thanks all The model is now almost finished far enough for painting, so that will probably happen soon.

[Guest]

Here are some pics of the almost-finished model.

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The engine cowling is still loose, but the canopy is glued on already with Humbrol Clearfix (a bottle priced in guilders, and still 90%+ full ). I applied the masking first, from Tamiya tape stuck on and burnished down, then cut along the lines of the framing.

The antenna is not the usual type. Tamiya says not to fit either of the two antenna masts for marking option A, but doesn’t say why. Then I found this photo on a page that talks about Corsair antennas:



It shows the exact aircraft that Tamiya provides markings for, No. 29 of VF-17. The antenna attaches to almost the end of the right horizontal tailplane, goes up to the top of the tailfin, and then to the little bulge on the fuselage behind the cockpit where the antenna lead normally came out to attach to the regular antenna. The plane also has a small whip antenna in place of the rear mast.

I duly reproduced this on my model by drilling 0.35 mm holes in the required places:

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The one at the top of the fin is because I managed to break off the moulded antenna connector, but that was in the wrong place anyway. I then inserted 0.3 mm spring steel into the fin and for the whip antenna, and used 0.25 mm copper wire (from an electrical cord) for the wire antenna:

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I glued it into the hole in the tailplane first, bending the wire double to make it fit better, then looped it around the bit of wire on top of the fin, and ran it to the hole I drilled in the little bulge. Getting it somewhat tight for that last run turned out to be a bit troublesome, though.

[dave]

Good progress, interesting to follow as I am think8ng of building a Corsair. There is something about that gull wing

[Guest]

*sigh* And another two months have gone by before I’ve done any real work on this model …

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This time it was mostly because of a couple of non-starters: first a white primer that wasn’t, then white paint that just wouldn’t spray (thinned Vallejo Model Color). Letting it sit for a couple of weeks more, I finally got it to what you can see above, but again, not without trouble: after spraying the bottom with white Vallejo Surface Primer from a can, I put Vallejo Model Air IDF Blue on the fuselage sides with my airbrush yesterday but had a lot of overspray where I had hoped for a reasonably fine line. (The wing undersides were fine, as I’d masked the edge because this should be a hard line where the folding wing panel meets the static one.)

After giving up for the day, I returned this afternoon to first spray Vallejo Model Air Signal White over most of the unwanted paint, and by using more air pressure than I had it set for yesterday, I got the amount of overspray under control. Then I put Vallejo Model Air USN Sea Blue into the airbrush and did the uppers. Unfortunately I then went a bit low with that on the sides of the nose, and had to put more IDF Blue in to have any medium blue on the nose at all

The engine is hand-painted, mainly Tamiya Gun Metal followed by some drybrushing with a silver colour and painting the crankshaft housing at the front light grey with a medium grey wash.

On to the decals, I think …

[yak face]

Only just seen this one jakko , nice progress. The Tamiya own tooled classic warbirds 1/72 kits are excellent arent they , i had a good look at one of their 1/72 zeroes and its like the corsair , beautifully detailed and no doubt a flawless fit. Be careful if you want to get more tamiya 1/72 aircraft though . They re-boxed a lot of italeri kits for the japanese market so always do an internet search of the kit youre thinking of getting , scalemates is a great resource for checking the provenance of a kit. Some of the italeri stuff isnt bad but its not in the same league as their own toolings. Cheers tony

[Guest]

This is my first Tamiya 1/72 scale kit, and I did exactly as you said: I knew they rebox Italeri kits, and thought this was one too. On doing a little research it turned out to be an original one, so only then did I decide to buy it And yes, fit is flawless, and like I said above, the cockpit is simply amazing — detail like I remember from the couple of 1/48 scale aircraft I built 25+ years ago, but in 1/72.

[colin m]

Great build Jakko. The nice thing about these pacific Corsairs is, you can weather them to death, if you want to of course.

[Guest]

I was thinking of going for something like this:

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OTOH, I found a photo of the real No. 29 (see above) and it doesn’t look that weathered, so I think I’ll keep it restrained. I’ll probably follow the box art, with fairly worn wing leading edges, plus some dirt like in the photo, but not much more than that.

[Si Benson]

Despite the paint problems, it’s coming along nicely Jakko

[Guest]

Decals and nose on as well now:

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The white striping is wrong a bit, angled too far down on this sude and not enough on the othet, but too late to fix that now (to be honest, had I looked at it more closely before, I would have sprayed the cowling white and masked the stripes before adding the blue).

I also noticed I managed to break off the pitot tube on the left wing It was still there when I painted the model, because I remember spraying it, but it appears to have disappeared by the time I took the photos of the painted model.

[Guest]

Time for the wheels. Important tip for other builders of this kit: don’t glue on the landing gear before adding the front doors (parts A24 and A25) to them — I glued the struts into the wheel wells first, and then couldn’t get the doors on. Trying to remove the struts broke off their locating pins, so I had to drill them out and add pins:

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These were made from 0.6 mm steel florist’s wire. They caused another unforeseen problem, though: the new pins were so long that the landing gear was hard to install because the smaller, rearward struts are a very tight fit in the front wells. The best way is to put the rear bit in first, then rotate the front pin in place — but that wasn’t possible with these long replacement pins, so I had to kind of force both in at once. Luckily nothing broke.

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Those with an eye for detail and knowledge of the real No. 29 may spot that there isn’t a number on the wheel well doors, when the kit does provide a decal for it. This is because of a dumb mistake on my part: as mentioned, I had left the doors separate (for ease of painting) and when I put the decals on, I got them the wrong way up because I mistook the way the doors will fit One of the decals came loose when I wetted it, the other refused to budge and eventually tore. I felt it was better to just remove both and pretend there should be nothing on the doors at all. (I couldn’t make 29 from the decals for the other options in the kit, else I would have: they’re aircraft Nos. 89 and 122, but only 89 had numbers on the doors.)