F7F-3 Tigercat - BuNo 80405 - VMF 312 MCAS - El Toro, CA 1946

[scvrobeson]

Looks great in the primer coat!  While it does cover up a lot of the work you've had to do, it does really tie it together.

 

 

Matt 

[brahman104]

Brilliant work Brian! It's good to see it united under a coat of primer. My hat's off to you for going to the lengths you have, but I totally get it for the love of the subject!

 

Cheers,

 

Craig

[Rocat]

Amazing work!

[Out2gtcha]

Thank you gentlemen, and happy new year!  Its already 2022 where some of you are, but its a couple hours + away yet here.

 

While I wait, I did some filling on the Tigercat. I guess  I was fooling myself when I said that was "the last coat of primer" as this last grey round really exposed a lot of flubs I could not see when it was not all 1 color. 

 

I also had to clean off a LOT of Q-tip/cotton bud hairs that some of the raised PE collected as well. 

Some Tamiya tube filler to the rescue!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The upper joint between the horizontal stabilizers and the vertical stab was an especially gappy area that needed some filler. The rear spine needed a bit of filler as well.

 

 

 

 

 

After this filler has cured by tomorrow, I will proceed to finish sand all of the problem spots I marked with a pencil (and there were a LOT!) then go over those areas again with primer. 
THEN I can finally start the rest of the re-scribe. 

 

Its real cold here and REAL icy, so I'm happy to spend the new year snug at home with my two favorite things, the wife and some models.

Cheers and happy 2022 to all!   

[KiwiZac]

22 hours ago, Out2gtcha said:

Its real cold here and REAL icy, so I'm happy to spend the new year snug at home with my two favorite things, the wife and some models.

Aww, that's so lovely! Happy New Year to you too Brian, I'm excited to see what 2022 brings for you and the Tigercat.

[Out2gtcha]

Happy New Year all!

 

Here I am........

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Round 3 tomorrow likely.

 

Cheers!

 

[MikeMaben]

Same to you Brian.  Nice kitty 

[Jack]

Best wishes Brian, and i feel you're gonna win that fight, looking gooooood

[IvanVasili]

Looks like paint job is imminent?

[Out2gtcha]

Thanks once again all!  Its nice to have somewhere to 'vent" as the term goes...............and I sometimes feel this build needs a LOT of venting!

 

On 1/2/2022 at 6:29 AM, IvanVasili said:

Looks like paint job is imminent?

 

Possibly............

I only say possibly, as I don't want to get too ahead of myself with SO much left to do before actual paint goes down. There have been so many rounds of priming, filling and sanding that there is a significant portion of the model that will need to be completely re-scribed, which I am NOT looking forward to, but its something that must be done before paint can even be thought of.

 

I had to jump around again a bit to keep my sanity, as these final rounds of sanding and filling have got me down a bit, even though it has made the surface of the model much better. 

 

Back to the gear...........this time its the nose gear not the MLG. I've been thinking a lot about stance and how I do NOT want the dreaded "California lift" that the T-Cat gets a lot when not fueled up, or lightly loaded with a very nose high attitude. 

My goal with the stance of the model is for neutral level or maybe just a slight tail down attitude as that is norm for the aircraft, but I just hate the drastic nose high look. With this in mind I made the nose gear oleo strut about as short as I'm comfy with on a flying example, and lengthened the MLG oleo struts to as long as as I've seen on a flying example, all to try to counteract the heavy nose up attitude.

 

I have also found 1 more thing that may help as I was delving over the nose gear and nose wheel recently. The nose wheel example is from our own Harold, and is quite nice, being about the same diameter as the OOB HpH example, just with better tread.

The difference between the two is that the OOB nose wheel is in two parts with the hub being separate and Harold's example being all 1 piece except for 1 half of the rim. 

 

There is also a 2nd nose wheel that was used on the F7F and it normally has the disk cover over it, and has a smaller overall diameter than the larger normally uncovered nose wheel.

You can see an example of the smaller covered nose wheel on an actual picture of 80405 here:

 

 

 

 

 

There is also a couple different versions for the paint scheme of 80405 as well. Here is pic of 80405 from a slightly later time frame (still at El Toro) where they have either painted the A-99 on the bottom port wing or it is prior to the above pic and they removed it for some reason. I would probably guess the former.

 

 

 

 

As the cover on the nose wheel is just bolted onto what is essentially a non-covered nose wheel, I got an Idea to gain a couple scale inches in the nose. Since Harold was gracious enough to send me an extra version of the smaller covered wheel I decided to try to hack it up and see if I could get the OOB HpH wheel to eventually fit inside it, and make a smaller un-covered nose wheel since no one can prove 80405 never had an uncovered nose wheel. 

If I'm being honest, for as nice as Harold's nose wheel is, the OOB HpH wheel is slightly more crisp in molding, but it remained to be seen if I could make it fit. Since I already had a nose wheel I planned on using, albeit a bit large, I decided to take a stab at it, since if I ruined it, I would loose nothing. 

 

I used consecutively larger drill bits until I got to 1/4", then I broke out my stepped hand reamer and bore it out the rest of the way VERY slowly.

In the end while not perfect I got there, and it turned out very decent indeed and is in fact closer to the diameter of the nose wheel pics I have. 

 

You can see the difference between Harold's un-covered nose wheel/tire VS his smaller nose tire with the HpH wheel inserted. Quite a difference I used a bit of Mr Surfacer 1500 black to smooth out the transition a bit prior to primer:

 

 

 

 

 

 

I got round 2 of primer down, and that included the main wheels/tires as well as both the larger and smaller finished nose wheel/tire combos. 

 

 

 

 

 

While not perfect the newly created smaller nose wheel seems a bit more crisp looking on both the tire and wheel, and after some finish sanding should be just fine.

 

 

 

 

 

Its a little hard to see, but I also completely stripped the paint and primer off of the turning brass nose wheel I made a few years ago, and revamped it to have the axle area be a bit more accurate.

 

Nose gear V2.0

 

 

 

 

 

 

All for now as I'm headed back down to see if I can finalize the finish today, which means I can start the re-scribe soon.

 

Cheers! 

[Phartycr0c]

Happy new year Brian. 

 

Again superb work going into making this a blinding build. 

Keep fighting the good fight. 

 

[Out2gtcha]

Thanks again all!

 

More progress although sometimes with the end results I don't always feel like it is. Pics in a min.........

[Out2gtcha]

Jumping around once again to save my sanity, and possibly actually finish a piece of this puzzle I moved back to the props which I "finished" a few years ago. I stared at them a lot over the past few years and thought I could I could live with the way over-sized warning tips on the props, but I couldn't.  I masked off the prop boss and base and set to work sanding down the previous paint demark.

Even though its sanded you can see how over-sized the tip markings were:

 

 

 

 

 

I proceeded to spray the yellow and then mask for the black, but that all is drying atm. While the props dry, I moved on to detailing the steering mechanism for the front wheel.

I still looks rougher than it actually is since it too needs a final primer coat, but this part also has the front oleo which is masked off atm:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once that was complete I put it aside to dry and jumped around once again, this time to start the next very dreadful part of this build (and hopefully one of the last really bad parts!) and that was the exhausts!  All 36 of them..........

 

That mean removing the existing masking that I had done for the priming, but I felt like I wanted to get the gear and the exhausts both out of the way before final primer and paint, and they both required removing the masking and aligning the engines again. 

Fortunately last time I had coded each engine right to left and made them easily removable and attachable for this very purpose.

They both still fit excellently!   

 

Lots of detail repair work to do on them since they sat for a year+ on the bench rolling around occasionally:

 

 

 

 

 

I figured I start on the bottom 6 exhausts on each engine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Each journey begins with a single step..............so pitter patter lets get at er! 

I decided to use a combination of the OOB resin exhausts augmented with some wire I purchased of the same diameter. 

Exhaust #1 out of 36:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One made and only 35 to go!      

 

 

MORE..............

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Out2gtcha]

The main issue here OOB is that HpH will just have you drop the ends of the exhausts off "somewhere close" to the engine exhaust ports and just called that good enough. On this build for me that is definitively NOT good enough. I know you likely wont be able to see in  there and that is likely the reason they did that, but I just cant fathom not doing it, as its my all time favorite aircraft and I'm not likely to build one more detailed than this one, so Ill know they are all there and all actually connect to their respective exhaust ports. 

That task is indeed a bit of a daunting one!  Some tubes are harder to get to their ports than others #6 on the bottom took some figuring:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With that said, I moved on to the center 4 lower exhaust stacks #s 2,3,4 & 5 which are together in the middle of the lower exhaust openings to allow the cowl flap actuators through. Bit-O-Blu tack to hold things temporarily in place while I aligned everything. Everything here is just in the initial stages as I will need to further glue and fill some of the longer stacks:

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

And finally we have the full lower exhaust compliment stacks 1-6 on the starboard side made:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whew!  Those 6 stacks took me 2 hours approximately to cut, fit and glue them all up in their new positions, so I figure that's about 20 min per, so with about 10 more hours of continuous work and I should have the rest built and fit up, not counting the time it will take for finishing, filling, priming sanding painting and final attachment..............I can only guess that part may be just as long or longer.

Now that I know its possible I can move on to doing the rest, and will then fill sand and paint them all. This is going to be a L O O O O O O O O O N G process gents. 

 

Oh joy.   

 

Well that is 6 exhaust stacks done, only 30 more to go! 

 

 

[Troy Molitor]

Beat this B--ch into submission and get some dark blue on her and GO, Go go!   Mean while....Go Georgia!