Oldbaldguy

I know you are putting this end of the airplane to bed for a while, but there are a couple of things to consider in your off hours: Tires - if the airplane you are modeling operated off a dirt or coral strip, then the rolling surfaces would be a lighter color than the rest of the tire, maybe by quite a bit. The side of the wheel adjacent to the brakes will show a lot of brake dust staining. Tank filler - any fuel spilled over at the tank filler will run down the fuselage sides and will clean off some of the exhaust and oil stains wherever it goes. It will also bleach out the paint a bit as well. Fuel spills are additive, so there will be several layers of it. Because avgas is as liquid as water, the leading edge of the spill will be pretty sharp and straight, and will leave the most significant mark. The spill will fade to the rear because the gas wicks away as it runs down hill and toward the rear of the airplane. Because a gas evaporates quickly, it doesn’t smear like oil or exhaust residue. POL stains - there is a lot of high speed air pushing oil and other viscous goo aft in the slip stream. These too are additive in that they happen every time the airplane is flown and tend to run much farther aft than you would expect. When my last Cessna 182 sprung a tiny leak, the oil covered the belly from the firewall to the rudder but there was no noticeable loss on the dipstick, the point being it doesn’t take much to make an ugly mess when the goo is accelerated to 300 mph in the slipstream. Not all grunge is hydraulic. People leave foot and handprints all over the place so places that are handled a lot will show dirt. Surfaces where guys had to walk to load ammo, work on stuff or whatever will show the color of the local dirt from their shoes ground into the paint. Otherwise, you’ve nailed it.

I am forever amazed at the things we talk about on this site and I mean this in a good way.

Not sure it’s as big a deal as you think. These airplanes were patched and spot painted into oblivion already. A little careful touch up and some weathering and goo and yer good to go. I can tell you from experience, btw, that nothing sticks to aluminum if it isn’t clean and free of anything oily, fingerprints included. Did you perhaps get a tight grip on your model there when barehanded at some point?

Although I am dedicated to building only things with a hook, I find Panthers and Cougars less appealing than any of the Furies or the Tiger. Seen ‘em all, crawled all over ‘em, watched them in droves fly over and around my house in Oceana for years. The Fury squadrons sported some pretty nifty paint schemes; the dark blue jets and the Tigers not so much. Having said all that, any of them would look grand parked on my LSP ramp. Would likely have to get a second mortgage to fund them, however.

I think the photos of the 1:1 airplanes above are of Royal Navy Corsairs, so colors and maintenance procedures and other dogs and cats things will differ from the Navy/Marine airplanes in the Pacific.

This manual is a surprisingly good source of detail information for anyone building a Viggie kit. NAA did a really good job illustrating their manuals back in the day. My dad was a Viggie weapons systems instructor until the advent of the RA-5C and I read his manuals from cover to cover every chance I got. Learned a lot of useless stuff, but the illustrations were my favorites. While they may not have been 100% accurate for some views of the airplane, they were mostly dead-on accurate, fine line detail drawings that pretty much show you everything you need to know. The how to fly the airplane parts are interesting reading now that there are no more Viggies, but the illustrations are pure gold for the likes of us. Highly recommended.

Could be an issue stemming from different models of the P-40, but from what I can see in photos of later airplanes, the large streamlined fairing that cleans up the airflow coming out of the radiators and the longer, skinnier fairing behind it are less two separate parts like you have it and more one big part with gappy joints. The external tank hardware confuses issues a bit when trying to figure things out but it sure looks to me like there may not be as much going on there in later airplanes than what you are trying to build into your model. Of course, your airplane is an early one, so Curtiss may not have gotten the simplicate and streamline memo at that point.

I think you should consider using a dark color for the LSO windbreak. In 1/48, probably something close to flat black. LSOs are/were officers. For the time period you are talking about, officers wore khakis aboard ship. Even their coveralls/flight suits were khaki, so it would be tough to pick out the LSO from the background if everything were khaki colored. As time went on, they started adding color panels here and there, but the backstop was always a dark color for contrast so that the landing pilots could see them. No doubt someone will post a photo of a light colored backstop, but darker is better. Bomb carts? No idea. I know yellow gear was once USN gray, but I don’t have a clue when the change occurred. They got pretty banged up and very little love, so heavy weathering will be your friend in this case.

In fact, after enlarging the b&w of yer guy sitting on the cockpit sill, it appears that you can see some of the original red surround - not white overspray - peaking out from under the insignia blue where a bit of the blue has worn off! Your build alone is really expanding the body of knowledge of these airplanes.

Love your firewall! What a difference!!

Well, the red surround lasted literally only a couple of months early in the war - something like July to September 1943 - before units were told to paint over the red with insignia blue to cut back on friendly fire incidents. Even though the photo is black and white, I don’t see any evidence of red around the national insignia in the photos of old number 17. Personally, I don’t put much stock in the accuracy of aircraft profiles because, having done a boatload of ‘em myself, artistic license always creeps in somewhere, so the one you reference may not be 100% accurate. So, if you are modeling the airplane as it existed in July and August of 1943, go with red surrounds. Anything later: blue.

A trip to your local Hobby Lobby store might be in the offing if there is one near you. They have all sorts of crafty sticky, tape-y things in different aisles all over the store. No telling what you might find.

Ya know, whatever tape they used at the time would have been pretty thick. The idea was to cover over the seams and joints which were already pretty tight, so it’s not likely you would have seen much detail at all through the tape. Admittedly I haven’t really looked, but it seems to me that none of the tape seen in photos is very dirty or weathered. I can’t see it lasting very long in the blast of air behind that prop once it was soaked in avgas. Sort of put down the tape, fill the tank, tape comes off during the next flight, put down the tape, fill the tank, tape comes off ad infinitum. It likely didn’t stick around long enough to get dirty, no pun intended. This was a stop-gap effort, not a final solution, so precision was not high on the list of priorities, especially if they were using whatever was at hand until Vought cooked up a fix.

I vote for the diamond tread tire and wheel combo and the tailhook. The hook because it’s a Navy airplane and was born with it, and the wheels because they are epic and should not be wasted. Kill markings, tank tape and such? Don’t care.

If the “tape” is there to prevent a gas from seeping/leaking out, how did they get it to stick to an already dirty surface once the adhesive comes in contact with 100+ octane avgas that is documented as hot enough to strip paint? And if the tank were leaking enough for it to be an issue for the pilot, wouldn’t the mechs just fix the tank? I agree with Jay: Something about this doesn’t add up. Sadly, none of the guys who put the stuff on are around to tell us exactly why they did it.