Oldbaldguy

Wow. Good questions. To be honest, I don’t remember how the intake trunks were finished. As you say, they are smallish and dark inside and a bit hard to paint. I painted mine white because it was the easiest thing to do and admit they could look better. The most important thing to remember about modeling Navy airplanes is that, while there are rules and specs, they are still Navy airplanes, so anything is possible, meaning you can do pretty much what you want within reason paint-wise and still have a good chance of being more or less right. Without looking it up, I think the red gear door edges came along about the same time as the gray and white paint scheme and was definitely in place by the time they started painting their trainers red and white (Prop trainers were yellow previously, the Lockheed TV-2s were initially silver then red and white, the short-lived Temco jet trainer was yellow, but all the Buckeyes and everything after were red or orange and white.). However, in an example of Navy contrariness, while new Vigilantes rolled out of the factory in the 60s with white gear doors with red edges, it was common to see them on the ramp with solid red gear doors, red wheels and other such things and no one seemed overly concerned. If you haven’t already, you should visit Tommy’s Tailhook Topics site. He covers a wealth of Navy truth, including subjects like these. Paul’s Cougar kit is pretty nice. The only issues I had in building mine were the nosewheel was a little loose in the fork and had to be worked on a bit (I recommend scratching a solid axle if you can) and one main gear strut came out shorter than the other. I honestly don’t know if that was sloppy building on my part or something to do with the kit. The issue required a bit of a creative fix to have the model sit level, but that is why we do this, innit?

I built my TF-9J as a red and white jet from the late 60s. This particular airplane was assigned to RVAH-3 based at NAS Sanford, Florida, and was fairly representative of Navy Cougars of the day. It had white gear bays, white struts, white gear doors outlined in red, although it was not uncommon to see these airplanes with all red doors. The boards were overall red inside but the air brake bay was white. Don’t have any idea how you will display your model, but the brakes on 1:1 jets when they were parked tended to sag partly open but not all the way down when there was no power to the system, so that is how I portrayed mine - open just a bit. This was a common occurrence on other airplanes like the F-8 as well. Since you really can’t see inside the air brake bay, I simply left the hydraulic rams out. If you elect to put the rams in yours, the trend at the time was white, but they could just as easily have been red. The Cougars at Sanford were pretty tired and time worn, but they weren’t overly dirty or heavily weathered. They sat out in the sun a lot, so the paint was pretty flat. I have no idea if any of this applies to the Marine FAC jets used in Vietnam - never saw one of those.

This is a great build so far - obviously, you’ve been there and have real, first hand knowledge of the venerable 172. My only comment is that you seem to have missed the part where Cessna carpet always turns baby shyte yellow- brown with time, no matter what color it was when new.

The Corsair page at kiwiaircraftimages.com has a boatload of detail photos, including the wells ahead of the main spar. Might want to check there.

But I assume we agree that the brakes are always on the strut side of the wheel, no matter which version or which wheels we’re talking about, right?

What is it about BIG helicopter kits that drives us to abnormal behavior?

There is a real danger to being a peerless builder such as yourself because we get used to your magic and a little blasé about it. “Well, of course Peter did this impossible thing,” we think to ourselves. “Why wouldn’t he - he’s Peter.” To steer back to the real airplane for a bit: Something most people would never think about is the unbelievable deluge of noise the pilot had to endure from the short stacks of that massive motor just a couple of feet in front of his face. It had to be excruciating to fly that thing at full throttle. Personally, I don’t know how anyone did it. They must have died deaf.

Brake calipers are usually on the strut side. They have to be attached to a fixed structure.

Somehow, I find refurbishing/overhauling previously built kits very appealing and a worthwhile endeavor. Very glad to see someone else doing it, although in this case I don’t see how you can make it any better.

Shoulda had Tom Cruise do the series. Coulda called it Mission Impossible: The Mighty Eighth Episode. He’d have gotten it right except for the motorcycle and skydiving parts.

Yep. Some serious seamanship and boat handling skills going on there.

I’ve had a wee dram or two. That ain’t a wee dram. Would kill a close relative for that ‘stache, by the way.

Okay, I can discern several different colored panels here and there on the airframe that look to me like test strips or paint repairs but I cannot for the life of me make out what is supposedly being reflected in the “reflective” panels. Given their location on the vertical stabs, I can see how they might possibly be effective in confusing/diffusing the heat signature around the exhaust. This stuff is getting pretty tricksy, so who knows? Just seems odd that anyone would put big flashy mirrors on an airplane that was designed to be hard to see to begin with, if that’s what everyone is implying.

That’s a lotta cool stuff in one place, that right there is. There was once a similar place in Fabens, Texas. Had literal stacks of P-40 fuselages and wings outside and a complete Canadian Anson. I wonder if there is an accurate inventory of all this stuff anywhere.

Are you sure that’s a reflection? Sometimes we get stuck and can’t process what we think we see any way other than what is familiar. If it is a reflective surface we’re looking at, then what part of the airplane is it reflecting? The light is wrong for one thing and what we see doesn’t seem to line up with the wing or horizontal tail. The airplane is from the RAG, I think, and is pretty well “weathered”, so it could just as easily be mismatched paint or something like that. There are other light gray panels visible on the airplane as well.

Kinda restored my faith in mankind with that one. Good on ya. We could use a lot more shared good times to make up for the sad sitch we currently find ourselves in.

The graphic I saw showed that the control surfaces on the wings are honeycomb, the radome and vertical tail fairing are fiberglass and the rest of the tail and stabs are composite. Everything else is aluminum, steel or titanium. More or less. For some reason, I always thought they just poured the thing out of a bottle into a big mold and waited.

At first I was going to comment that it would be tough to polish all that composite material but I looked it up and discovered that 75% of the airplane’s skins are aluminum. Had no idea! Learn something new everyday.

Watched this earlier. That’s a lot of man hours right there.

Uh, are the rest of us missing a good story here?

Yeah, but that’s a really long honey-do list. You still haven’t finished your Smurf jet - can’t imagine how long it would take you to put a full-sized one back together.

Hmmm. Something weird going on here. That light colored patch looks like it was sprayed/painted on and it is odd that it is very apparent in B&W but doesn’t seem to be there at all in the colorized photo. In the first couple of photos, the crew chief is wearing a fatigue shirt and cover but in the one with the film crew the guy is shirt and hatless, so I’m guessing a re enactment for some newsreel footage. And that must have been one heckuva mud/coral puddle he taxied thru.

I read somewhere that it is illegal in 43 states for a man to be as lucky as you are.

Oooooooh! Now I get it! The Evergreen between the ribs was never intended to be the wing skin but is there to keep everything straight while reducing the amount of filler you will need to create the wing’s airfoil, right? Sorry, sometimes it takes me a while….

Lessee: $850K for the airplane, $850K for insurance, $850K for a years worth of gas, probably another $850K in required maintenance and another $850K to bribe the spousal unit into letting you buy it. So, yeah, that’s a pretty good deal. Oh, and it probably doesn’t turn any better than a Tomcat.