1/32 Hasegawa F6F-5 Hellcat

Gallery Article by Olivier Barles on Feb 26 2014

 

 

Bonjour,
Here are a few pictures of my 1/32 scale Hasegawa Grumman F6F-5 Hellcat I just finished building a month ago.

I had this box for 25 years or so and I somehow let it sleep until I found it again last year.

The general shape of the model is rather accurate - at least, it does not have this inaccurate rounded back the Trumpeter model has, but to try reaching the current modelling standards, some work had to be done.

 

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If the model has wings with raised rived and engraved lines and panels, the fuselage has nothing engraved...

As on most of the Hellcat pictures there are many rivets heads on which paint has been erased, in order to reproduce that look I decided to delicately engrave the lines of the fuselage sections but keeping the raised lines of rivets around intact.

Then, after painting, I simply erased with a 3000 sand paper (and lots of care!) the entire model so that the rivets heads become visible in their natural metal color

I also went for other improvement works such as vacu-forming the sliding part of the canopy in order to keep it open in a realistic manner, scratch-building the cockpit, adding engine plugs cables and the brake cables on the landing gear...

Finally, I chose the markings of what should have probably been the most attractive deco ever painted on an Hellcat, the "Cat Mouth" of the VF-27...

Merci,

Olivier Barles

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Photos and text © by Olivier Barles