1/32 Trumpeter Grumman F4F-3 "Guadalcanal"  Wildcat

Gallery Article by Olivier Barles on June 1 2012

 

 

"Guadalcanal"  Wildcat

Bonjour,

Here are a few pictures of my 1/32 Trumpeter F4F-3 "Guadalcanal" Wildcat.

A rather pleasant kit to build without any big bad surprises...
This time I mainly did it "straight from the box" for a change.

Nothing particular to mention in the assembling phase: I simply added the engine plugs wiring, the safety harness on the seat, the antenna cable and  a couple of contacts / cables in the cockpit...
But I also had no choice than vacu-forming the sliding part of the canopy, as the original one was too thick to have it opened without making a very ungracious and unrealistic angle with the fuselage axis.

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Again, I mainly focused on the painting and weathering...

Main question came from the exact nuance of the Navy upper grey to apply.
In fact, this color can really change its tonality depending on how the day light hits it...

Therefore, beside the fact that age can also change the colors of old photos, it adds a bit of difficulty to guess what were the exact nuances of Navy grey that could be seen on machines in operations.

So, as early 40's colored pictures of Wildcat indeed give a wide panel of camo tonalities going from "very blue" to pale blue grey on upper surfaces, I eventually decided to go for a mild grey blue.
Truth is that on a majority of all the documents I could find, color seemed to be "more gray than blue"...

This is an "assumed choice" that might not reflect what the real color looked like, but it was good fun to work it out...

And this time, I also chose to moderately weather the model, having tried to represent a Wildcat freshly landed at Henderson field so that sand, rain, sun and dust have not been undergone long enough to have its nice grey blue starting to fade away...

I now need to build the Trumpeter 1/32 Hellcat that lies somewhere on one of my shelves to get the whole collection of the WW II Navy Cats at that scale...

The Wildcat is under US Markings, the Bearcat you could discovered early April 2012 on ARC is under French colors, so I guess the Hellcat could be finished with a FAA British deco...

  "To be continued"...

Merci,
Olivier

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Photos and text © by Olivier Barles