I originally wasn’t going to do a work in progress on this one, but I ultimately decided to share it anyways. It’s the 1/48 Tamiya F4F4 Grumman Wildcat, one of my favorite kits. This was one of the first kits I tackled when I returned to the hobby and it played a huge part in my continued addiction to scale aviation modeling. This kit is so easy to build you really have to try hard to screw it up. After a disasterous Monogram P-61, I saw this one at Hobby Lobby and had to try it. I said…“well, maybe I can do this”. 20 years later…here I am with you fine folks[t$t]
Anyways, I’m building black 29, flown by First Lieutenant Jefferson DeBlanc of VMF112 on Guadalcanal. On January 31st, 1943, Deblanc lead 8 Wildcats on an SBD Dauntless bomber escort mission over the Solomon Islands. He quickly sprung a fuel leak and knew it was a one way mission. He considered turning back deriliction of duty, so he pressed on. He told the other to send out rescue because he’d be “down there with the sharks”. Well, DeBlanc then proceeded to shoot down 2 FM1 Petes and 3 Ki-43 Oscars in a matter of 5 minutes. He was ultimately shot down himself and managed to evade capture for 3 days. In his ordeal he was eventually bartered from one tribe to another for “1 ten pound sack of rice” and eventually made it back to base. Deblanc would win the Medal of Honor for his selfless actions on that day and shoot down a total of 9 enemy aircraft in 2 tours during the war. Here’s my homage to a true hero.
I’ll dress it up with an Ultracast seat and Eduard PE in the pit.
I started with the pit. The first thing I did was cut out the floor, as the Wildcat didn’t really have one.
Truthfully, the out of the box pit is really good. Anything extra is just a bonus. I can rarely resist Ultracast seats though. I pretty much just used the photoetched instrument panel and rudders. The pit was done in Gunze Interior Green with a brown black Detailer wash
Ready to close her up.
Hardly even worth mentioning…a true shake and bake kit…
I then directed my attention to the Pratt Whitney R-1830. Tamiya does a nice rendition, to include molded in ignition wires, but it could stand some improvement. I figured I’d add new wires over the molded ones, with the hopes the old wires wouldn’t be that visible. I wasn’t willing to scrape off the molded wires and risk losing the cylinder detail. Smoke and mirrors…my modeling motto.
First we need a ignition ring. Some .25 Styrene rod works great secured with Tenax
Now we need the leads. Glue two pieces of .10 rod together and slice off the leads to the right length. Also attach with Tenax where appropriate.
Now the fun part (sarcasm). Get some old copper stereo wire and cut then to the right length. Bend and attach with instant superglue. No need to paint these as they were normally a copper color. It’s really not that bad and goes quick once you get going.
Once done, I primed it for Alclad Aluminum.
I taped off the gearbox since it was going to stay grey and sprayed the Aluminum thusly.
Here we are with hand painted magnetos then dry brushed silver. I also hand painted the ring and leads Model Master Chrome Silver.
I sprayed it with Testors Gloss as a barrier for the Detailer wash. This is where it starts to look the part…nice oily.
Here it is after a shot of Testors Dull then X-19 Smoke which adds that little extra to it…I’m done.
I’ll have another update soon…
Joe
