It’s a plane! An F4U-1D Corsair to be more specific

Long time no post, but since I have this on my bench; why not. I started working on this two years ago after getting inspired at my local IPMS club’s annual contest with the intent that I’d get this done for the adjacent IPMS chapter’s following competition and this was 2 years ago in around Oct 2023. I actually started two Corsair kits, a 72nd birdcage and the 48th 1D with the intent that I could work on both at the same time. That was sorta true up until things just got simpler if I focused on one kit first. The last time I built an airplane kit was probably 35+ years ago when I was a wee lad. I’m pretty sure I built a Corsair back then too; I religiously watched Black Sheep Squadron on TV and loved the look of the wings. Over the years, I’ve collected a fair amount of Corsairs in different scales and from different makers – I just never actually did any work, until 2 years ago.

I’d lost the original pictures I took when I started this so I had to screen shot some posts I made 2 years ago from my Insta account. Apparently I completely built the two cockpits.

I also glued the fuselages, built and painted the engines and got the paint decanted from the tamiya spray cans.

I’d completely forgotten that I prepped the 48th scale kit for folded wings display too. Hence the modifications to the wings in the picture below. I missed the IPMS show last year so since the annual event is coming up on Oct, I grabbed these two from the started but not finished pile and set to work gluing subassemblies.

I generally like to test fit things so I don’t run into fun little fit together issues when I’m too far down the road. So here are some initial looks at things.

Lots of seam work and tons of mold lines to deal with; but the smaller sub areas were completed such as the landing gear and prop. In hindsight, I should have painted the cowl before gluing in the engine, painting would have been so much easier. But this lesson may be passed on to the next Corsair.

Cockpit needs to be masked off then I can get to working on erasing the seam and rescribing details.

Things are getting primed and it looks fairly decent so far. The bottom wing and fuselage piece is glued to the main body and some clamps to hold things in place so it doesn’t shift. Another test fit with primed wing parts.

I also got the jury struts aligned and glued with the wings in place so I don’t have to deal with that when the whole things is painted and ready for final assembly. Not sure if this is the best approach, but it made sense to me.

While work to clean up the wing and fuselage seams continued, the landing gear doors and cowl were painted with RAF dark sea grey (Mr Color 331). The undersides were painted with the same green as the cockpit and wheel wells – no pictures of that since I lost or didn’t take those pictures. The wings and body are then painted with the same dark sea grey and the cowl and landing gear doors were shaded with white.

Main body and wings get the same white shading treatment with an attempt to vary the amount of shading on different panels. Not sure if this will work out, but we’ll see when we’re done.

After everything is shaded, the main color, tamiya AS-8 Navy Blue is sprayed over everything and depending on how heavy a coat, the shading should blend through. Again, we’ll see once everything is done if this actually worked out. The navy blue is a strong color so it may have just completely covered the subtle shading effect I wanted to try.

Once that is cured for a day, a layer of gloss is sprayed over everything.

Canopy parts are masked and painted.

Decal work. The decals are pretty delicate and I ended up breaking a few, but with some careful application, I was able to salvage most of what I broke.

Decals done and also the hand painting details for lights and such is also applied.

Some decals broke and in the flaps down configuration I chose, some decals didn’t completely fit; so a little bit of making and painting is needed.

The kit is currently in the dehydrator curing the latest clear gloss and all the fun steps next should be well documented for the next post on this.

Until then, building a plane is a nice change of pace. Well, a nice change of pace to build anything. Technically, the last project I finished was also a plane – the Elintseeker…