1/48 Tamiya F4U-1D

by Chaz Nims

--------------------

 

This was my second time to build this kit. The only aftermarket parts were an Eduard photoetch instrument panel and seat belts. The wing star insignia were painted on using Tally-Ho masks. The fuselage stars were decals from CAM. The checkerboard was made from a painted gloss white stripe covered with individual squares of insignia blue decal film.

Click on images below to see larger images

I wanted this model to be more blue in color than the Testors gloss sea blue color, which is almost black. So I mixed gloss sea blue and blue angels blue, about 50/50.

The Tamiya gunsight part does not include a lens, just a flat, slightly convex top. I wanted to find out if this was normal, but I could not find any good documentation. I found one very complete looking web-page, but all the pictures were red x's. As a result, I added a round lens to the gunsight just because I liked the look better that way. I also left out Tamiya's representation of the armored glass behind the windscreen which is not shaped correctly at all.

The wings are the only difficult part of this kit. I tried gluing the top wing halves together first this time. Unfortunately, this did not really work any better than making the inner wing and outer wing assemblies per the instructions, which I had tried for my first build. I was left this time with a large gap on the bottom of the wing and some sanding and re-scribing on top.

The pictures were taken with an Olympus C4000 digital camera, indoors with flash and a tripod. F stop was manually set to 11, which is the highest number on this camera. Shutter speeds were about 1/2 second. 

Chaz

Click on images below to see larger images

Photos and text © by Chaz Nims