1/48 Hasegawa F6F-3

Gallery Article by Chaz Nims on Aug 27 2003

 

I thought this F6F kit from Hasegawa was superb. The fit was quite good, cockpit detail was good enough that no resin needed to be added, and the surface engraving was flawless. I know about the cowling shape issue, but I could live with the kit cowling. The only additions to the kit were a p/e instrument panel, p/e seatbelts, a vacform canopy, and brass tubing machine gun barrels. I didn't have any of the perforated barrels from Karaya at the time, but they would look quite good on the two longer barrels I'm sure.

 

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I did revise the mounting brackets for the drop tank to resemble detail seen in photos. I also used bare metal foil for the landing gear oleos. Unfortunately, it doesn't show in the pictures. I did not use a wash in the panel lines because of the dark blue upper surfaces. I wish now that I had. I think it would have looked good on the white and lighter blue.

The pictures were taken with an Olympus 4000 digital camera. F-stop was manually set to 11, which is the max on this camera.

Chaz Nims

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Photos and text © by Chaz Nims