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Hasegawa F6F Hellcat


wingman777

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Here is the top of the port wing from that the other Hellcat kit I adopted from Woody Von Dracek. He has filled in all the panel lines and was going to rescribe it. I know many of you might take this same path and I'm sure the panel lines would look more to scale but I don't think it's the way Russ would do it. Remember, he'd usually build most of his kits within a two week period and I'm already way behind so we'll see about all that. I better start gluing and painting.

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Okay, getting on to the kit cockpit. Well I guess it isn't too awful bad....yeah right...it really is poor in detail. Fortunately for me I bought this jewel about 18 years ago and have been saving it for this very situation. I wish I'd bought several of them. Verlinden did a great job on this and it comes with some very nice resin and PE.

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You can see in this comparison how the resin parts make the kit parts look comical. ON the other hand I've seen guys build this kit right out of the box and it looked good. If you have a good pilot figure to help cover the lack of detail the kit cockpit can be alright.

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and finally a shot with some color on it. This is the very early stage of painting and looks kind of rough but I'll get it right with some weathering and such. The Hellcat has a fairly good sized cockpit and some of this detail will be obvious.

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Nice work mate! Good to know the Verlinden set is worth the effort. I've got this kit in the stash too (and appropriately enough, it's another one that Russ sent me!), and I've been eying one of these sets on eBay, wondering if they're worth it. Might snap it up if I can.

 

Kev

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Russ loved to throw stuff in and would approve I'm sure. He was always one to try and improve a kit no matter where the stuff came from, even if he scratch built it himself. The set will e a great improvement to the kit and a fitting tribute !

 

Cheers

 

Vughn

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  • 2 weeks later...

According to Russ's build rules I should be disqualified. He'd be finished with this build by now and it's been a long time since I touched mine but I'll continue anyway. I have the kit cockpit, the Verlinden resin version and the Eduard photto etch version. I"ll do some experimenting with the three types to see what I can come up with. This first shot shows the kit parts on the left and the resin on the right. You can see the kit part has the sides curved inward near the top of the bulkhead indicating it'll be for an aircraft with the windows behind the cockpit ( a -3 or an early -5 ). Notice the greater detail for the Verlinden rear bulkhead. It's very nicely detailed but little of it will be visible once the cockpit is completed so at this point both will work fine. In studying images the funny part is that the padded headrest on the left is the right shape for the -5 and the Verlinden part, though clearly intended for use on a -5 has the correct shape for the headrest of a -3. Have I lost anybody so far? :closedeyes:

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I learned one thing about super detailing cockpits when I built the Revell F4F-4 Wildcat. Most of the fancy detail you add will not be appreciated by anybody except yourself because nobody will be able to see and most people don't pay much attention to it. Well, that being said here are the three instrument panels, kit on the left, resin in the middle and then the photo etch. One thing you can clearly see once the model is completed is the instrument panel. If you've ever worked with PE you probably agree with me that it's VERY frustrating to work with. You can spend hours of tedious agony only to lose the miniscule part you've worked on or bend it as unusable. Still, for the larger parts like the IP I use them when I can. To me....it looks more realistic than the other choices, you can even read the guages. I"ll use this Eduard PE with my Verlinden resin to get the best overall cockpit.

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Guest Peterpools

Appreciate the comparison photos of the kit parts to the Verlinden set. What a difference. Your work on the the instrument panels again was very informative and definitely pointed in the right direction to go. Looking forward to following along and enjoying the build.

Peter

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