STM

Since there is a steel rod through both the gear and the fork it may not be necessary. I will just see and adjust fire as necessary

The castings look pretty rough and will take a fair amount of clean up. Close inspection of the gear struts in my kit reveals that there is a steel rod skeleton imbedded in all of the resin strut pieces! That is an awesome touch. I was afraid that I was going to have to do that myself; make the skeleton from steel wire, drill a channel in each strut, insert the skeleton and fill the channel and wire with some liquid resin. HPH did it for me.

I like a challenge! I, like you, was delighted to find a "braille scale" Tigercat. I have examples of all the other Grumman piston powered "cats" and this one will complete them. I have the 1/32 Hasegawa Hellcat where I completely tossed everything except the exterior pieces and scratch built the cockpit, firewall and everything forward of it (except a metor resin R-2800), wheel wells and landing gear, port .50's, everything aft of the pilot's bulkhead, dropped the flaps and separated all of the flight control surfaces. Right now I am working on the 1/24 Airfix F6f-5 and although it is an excellent kit, I am doing a fair amount of scratch building on it too. I have an online build page on my website: Airfix 1/24 F6F Hellcat | scottmurphyphoto (scottmurphyphotography.org)

Boy oh boy!. I have looked over many of the pieces, the level of detail is astounding. I doubt there is much I will have to add to this one. This is, however, my first all-resin kit so it should be a learning experience to say the least.

I have not spent much time looking at this kit but the first thing that sticks out to me is that the spinner shape is wrong. The kit spinner looks too elongated and blunt compared to reference photos. Depending on how thick the styrene is you may be able to correct this.

I built this kit about a year ago. The cockpit was pretty spartan and the consoles (a pet peeve of mine) fictional. I downloaded the Bearcat pilot's manual and rebuilt the consoles. The wheel wells were usable but there was an awful gap between the center section and wheel wells themselves. I ground all the trunks smooth and made new ones out of Milliput. I did scratch build everything from the pilot bulkhead aft and left the large fuselage entry panel open. The engine was acceptable but required a fair amount of work to bring it up to my minimum standard. Overall this is a good kit of an oft neglected subject.

No, they were just friction fit for the photograph.

I spent the better part of a day doing the exhaust stubs. They are very convoluted and each piece had two parts. The first two were an exercise in frustration but once I got into a rhythm, they went pretty smoothly. It was here that the very tight tolerances in this kit became the most apparent. It took some fiddling to get the stubs past push rods, heat shields and spark plug wires until they fit into their respective holes. I really did not have to do much here, I drilled out the exhaust stub ends to a more scale thickness and filled seams in the pieces. I painted them Testors Metalizer "Burnt Iron" and then weathered them with pastels. All of the supercharger bits are together and painted, I just have to connect everything up. The large oil tank that attaches to the bulkhead is well detailed, but strangely enough, has no oil line piping. Not to worry, a little bit of solder will fix that.

The engine is now completely finished and better photographed. I gave the entire engine a coat of clear semi gloss once everything is in place. Radial engines were notorious "leakers" so I dirtied it up with some Tamiya black and brown panel line detailer and AK Interactive "Engine Oil". The AK stuff is fantastic. Airfix did a very good job on the engine but I took it a step further. This piece took some fitting as the parts had a very tight fit. I now have to get started on everything from the firewall forward.

After over a week and a half the engine is for the most part complete. I have to add the air intake ducting to the back of the engine tomorrow. At 1/24 scale you can see how large this engine is!

no worries!

The other component of the propeller governor is now complete. There is not much work needed on the magnetos so after that next up is the carburetor.

What sidewall are you referring to? If you are talking about the right cockpit side, that is not black, just in shadow.

With the collars complete, I moved onto the engine itself. The propeller governor was pretty basic. The two areas of the model which are the areas of greatest interest are the cockpit and engine, especially if it is a radial engine. I started with the front of the engine and will work backwards. The propeller governor is pretty basic. I found an excellent photo of one so it formed the basis of the work. This was 6 hours worth of scratchbuilding. The cooling fins are pieces of 0.005" styrene sheet. The propeller shaft was solid, though it should be hollow and the splines to hold the propeller were flush with the sides of the shaft, which of course would do no good. I drilled out the center of the shaft, drilled 8 holes around the top and added a piece of 0.010" x 0.020" styrene strip to build up the splines. There is a hexagonal nut at the center of the spinner so I drilled out the rod in the center and replaced it with a piece of 0.040" styrene hex rod. I also added 0.010" rod to simulate the "bolts" to the nuts that are holding the spinner halves together.

Work on the engine has begun in earnest. The first thing I did was make some attachment collars to go around each cylinder. In this large a scale, their absence is noticeable. I made a couple of careful measurements and with a little trigonometry (I hate math but I have to admit that sometimes it comes in handy) made some circles out of 0.010 styrene sheet. I then used my "The Chopper", one of the handiest of all modeling tools I have ever come across, to cut off 0.015" thick sections of 0.030 styrene hex rod to make the nuts. The actual collars had around 20 nuts per collar but there is no point in losing my mind over that. Even at 12 per collar, that would be over 200 of them for all 18 cylinders. So I made 5 collars and attached them to some 0.040" styrene sheet and will cast them. Once cast I will remove them from the block with a large X-Acto chisel, make a cut in them to for a "split ring" and slip them around the base of each cylinder.

Bronze Green, Bell Green, Interior Green, Green Zinc Chromate and Yellow Zinc Chromate are all very different colors used by various manufacturers at varying times on various aircraft. You might want to familiarize yourself with each of them so you don't confuse them.

It matched the Vellejo perfectly as well. That must have been a typo. I corrected. it.

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I am not using Tamiya, I am using Vallejo acrylics. The yellow zinc chromate is testors enamel in the small bottle. The F6F-5 cockpit was not bronze green, it was interior green.

The tailwheel area was not very complex, but Airfix did leave off two of the bulkheads so I added them with styrene sheet. I added some details to the tailwheel strut and drilled out the holes in the tailwheel. I cut the tailwheel off and redid it so it will caster. I also added the extension, retraction spring by winding 0.010" soldier around a piece of 0.020" brass rod. There is a chain drive to extend and retract the tailwheel but unlike the 1/32 Hasegawa Hellcat I did, I chose not to bother here. The Hasegawa Hellcat tailwheel well was painted interior green so a black chain will be visible. In a glossy sea blue wheel well like this one, a black chain will barely be visible. It would be a lot of work for something you really won't be able to see. I already have over 2 months in at this stage of construction, I don't see any gain in spending hours on things that will not be visible. The fuselage from the cockpit aft is now complete so it is time to dig into the engine. The kit engine, in addition to being huge, is very well detailed and won't require a whole lot of detailing.

I have it!

Very nice work!

I took a slight detour when my decals arrived. I plan on finishing this model in the markings of CAPT. (then CDR and CAG) David McCampbell's "Minsi III", the leading US Navy ace in WWII and CMH recipient. But there is a hitch. Although CDR McCampbell's Minsi III was an F6F-5, it was an early one that still had the F6F-3 windows behind that cockpit. They were found to be basically useless so they were eventually deleted. The decals I found, by Aerocraft also had a resin conversion to backdate the -5 for McCampbells aircraft, at least as far as the windows go, but I chose not to use it. The clear resin is very clear but the detail work, especially the rivets, does not match the kit particularly well. And it would mean making a big cut in the fuselage which would require filling and a redo a lot of rivets. Instead, I chose to just use my -3 drawings and cut out the windows myself. I marked them on the fuselage in pencil and use my circle template to get the right curvature for the corners. I drilled out the corners and then cut the rest of the window with an X-Acto 2" razor saw (the one that goes with the 1/4" collet. Doing this meant adding some bracing between the pilot's rear bulkhead former and the next one aft. I will cut the windows from the styrene from a CD jewel case. The thickness of the styrene from the jewel case is almost exactly the same as that of the kit so it will work out perfectly. I added the radios, wiring, control cables and permanently attached the cockpit and aft bulkheads to the right half of the fuselage. With that this side of the model is complete with the exception of the tail landing gear. There is some additional detailing in the tailwheel well and the fuselage halves will be ready to be joined. The full build can be found at Airfix 1/24 F6F Hellcat | scottmurphyphoto (scottmurphyphotography.org)

With the instrument panel done, the cockpit is finally finished. On to the radios (which I have already made) and avionics, control cables and other assorted bits behind the pilot's bulkhead. The access hatch at the bottom of the fuselage is pretty large, about 1x1.75" so it will make the stuff inside fairly easily visible.

The main IP yes, the plate around the instrument cluster no. The kit piece was pure garbage, super thick and the holes were too small. I just went ahead and made one. The instruments themselves are out of the Eduard PE set. I looked high and low and could not find any Waldron 1/24 American Instruments or Hellcat cockpit placards, so I got the Eduard kit and used some some of pieces out of that. The Eduard PE set did had an overlay for the kit IP piece but not come with a plate for the instrument cluster. I made one out of 0.010" styrene sheet. It took a while to do it because I had to make the instrument bezels as well as the rivets for around each instrument. Making bezels is actually pretty easy if you have the punch set. I scanned the Eduard piece, adjusted the file slightly in Photoshop so it was accurately 100%, printed it out and attached it to a piece of styrene sheet and used it as a template to punch the holes with the Waldron Punch Set so they lined up perfectly. I used the 0.160" and 0.089" punches, which were just the right size.