Just finished this, last build for 2024. For a kit that was new tooled this year, it has a lot of issues. The engine cowl is a bit larger than the fuselage. The fuselage is 3 parts and there is an insert piece at the top in front of the windscreen that runs to cowl, this fitted poorly. The internal frame work around landing gear and engine seems over engineered with a lot of parts and aligning some of them was a nightmare. The canopy is a bit short height wise, and needed quite a bit of force to push down and glued with CA glue to hold it.
The kit does have raised rivet details, so it has nice details. And the decals are the best I have ever used, any brand.
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Great job whipping the kit into shape. You would hope new tools from established brands would be better engineered.
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I was surprised to be honest, but maybe there is too much technology sometimes. All 3D cad designed and tooled, do they actually sit down and build the kit? Or just trust the computer work?
What a shame. An insert in front of the canopy? Why would they need to do that? But you whipped it into shape, even if it wasn’t as much fun as it should have been,
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The panel goes from in front of the canopy right up to the cowl, not sure why the needed to do it like that other than make a higher parts count. 2 halves fuselages is quite sufficient I reckon
You’ve done a nice looking build. I’m currently working on the kit and am not experiencing the issues you mentioned. The top panel in particular seems to fit just fine, and the raised rivets and other panel line detail it provides would be impossible to preserve with a central seam.
You made a fine looking model of it in spite of the challenges. Nice work.
Grant, great work on your F4F! You got that shade of blue matched perfectly. Always liked the "portly"little Wildcat.
Nicely done, really like the wing gold. Need to do a kit with that feature.
Nicely done @Grant_Dalzell 
looks great! I just pulled the Tamiya F4F-4 out of my stash tonight to start working on next. Hopefully mine will look half as nice as yours does. Thanks for sharing!
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Wow, this work is spectacular… 
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