Down Goes Another Shelf Queen

I seem to be having a good year for moving along projects that have been hanging around half done. Five or six years ago I started a Tamiya Corsair with the intention of doing a Salvadorean bird from the “100 Hours War” of 1969, and all was looking good when I ran into a snag with the wings. The wing fold mechanism is perfect if you want to build her with the wings up, but building down, the issue of eliminating a highly visible gap is a challenge, and Tamiya’s engineering, while strong, is deceptive, in that you better have that alignment just so when you lock up the main anchoring parts, or you’ll have anchored it in the wrong place.

Guess what? Yup. I got the left wing fine, the right wing had a noticeable gap, and by the time I realised what was happening, the superglue was like a rock. What to do?

Well, I put it back in its box for a few years, isn’t that what you usually do? I took it out and pondered the problem a few times, and the last time I got the wing a bit straighter with much pushing and pulling and clamping and superglue, but it was still not right – no matter how close I got it, the torsion effect meant the glue would never hold and the gap would open up once more.

Could I tolerate a Tamiya kit with a shonky wing joint? Hmm … not really. I even considered punching a hole through the wing at that point and calling it battle-damaged, a nice flak burst through the trouble spot would disguise it fine. I recently decided to have one more fiddle with it and found the right wing to be loose anyway. I wiggled it a bit, developed some play on it and at last just snapped the damned thing away. The left wing snapped off too in the handling, but it glued directly back on fine.

A piece of the inner bulkhead of the wing stub snapped clean away too, and that seemed to fix the alignment problem, as the wing then snugged up to the mating line fine. Certainly on the top of the wing: I made the concession that a less perfect mate-up on the underside was acceptable. I also decided to build fresh for the Salvadorean plane, and go with a standard WWII midnight blue, using the famous VF-84 scheme in the kit, for two reasons – the dark blue scheme requires much less handling and would better obscure the joint, hopefully, than the four tone camo; and it would be far less work to do. The plane had basically been waiting to crest the hill and run to the finish for years, it was even all masked up. So, the quicker the better.

I offered up the errant wing with superglue and it mated acceptably. A small piece of plastic had snapped away from the skin on the top surface, so this was very carefully filled and sanded, then it was on with other prep. For instance, the Salvadorean bird had not carried long range tanks so the model was built clean, to do VF-84 in early 1945 she would need the twin tanks under the inner wings. I located the holes by the minor visible blemishes in the plastic of the outer skin, drilled them through and opened them up with files. Another element of WWII configuration was the radio-fit, which required the mast behind the cockpit, deleted in the 60s with the advent of more powerful radios, and this also was added after the fact.

Then I tackled the paintwork, the orange-yellow cowl ring, interior green over the canopy, and so forth. This is very straightforward, and I tried the kit decals. They were thin and opaque, with true whites, but shatter-prone, which caused some cussing. More than cussing, I aborted after a couple of major decals and sorted through my stash to find the same unit’s markings (VF-84, USS Bunker Hill, February 1945) on an early Aeromaster sheet, and used those. It required some fine tuning, removal of a bad one in a prominent place, respraying and clear coating, indeed more work than I anticipated, but challenge seems to be the spice of the hobby, and it was okay in the end.

The stencil data came from the kit sheet and went on fine, though the wing walks were also absent from the Aeromaster sheet and I omitted them as the kit items shattered immediately and I was right out of patience as far as masking and spraying them was concerned. Maybe one day in the future… Similarly, the pattern of tape sealing the panels around the fuel tank ahead of the cockpit was also not on the AM sheet and suffered the same exclusion for the same reason.

I did some exhaust stains on the underside in ruddy earth tones pigment, and allowed some natural metal chips and scratches to gather around the radiators, then used a graphite pencil to create paint loss at panel lines around the cockpit and access hatches, though I don’t see it showing up in photographs – I may have to be more aggressive with that.

This is my first Corsair in 1:48^th scale, though I did the same subject in 1:72^nd scale back in the 1980s as part of my early romance with the bent-wing bird from Vought. The kit was, in the end, more complicated and challenging than I anticipated, as Tamiya has such a shake’n’bake reputation, and the reviews of this kit were so glowing when it first came out. I’ll build it again, for sure, but be more cautious in a few places.