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Showing results for tags 'Kitbash! Academy F4F Wildcat ~ Amodel F4F-3S Wildcatfish. 1/72. in RFI.'.
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Time for a Kit-bash! Last time I did a kit bash was such a great success that its time to do another one! I made one good kit of a Helldiver out of two kits that had different things wrong with them. A couple of years back I bought the Amodel Wildcatfish kit , I started to build it, assembled the fuselage and went to fit the wings only to find that one wing is lower than the other! Since the wings are attached to the sponsons (and vice-versa) this would leave the whole model sitting cockeyed. Look at the wing roots. I was a little annoyed but I thought about it for a while and kept the kit anyway, decided that I could always base a conversion around an F4F fighter kit, so I bought a little ol' Academy kit for about £2 on eBay and put both away for now. That little Academy kit might be quite basic but in fact it has some very nice panel features on it! Now I have had some success with the Sword Seamew kit; its now had two coats of Insignia White on the underside, (needs a couple more), I thought it was time I got this little project started. The Amodel must be an early kit; its terrible, but I made a start anyway, I'll just merge the two kits together! I already have two little F4F models as diecasts so there is no point in having a third just now, but I could make a 'special' seaborne version of the Wildcat. The parts for both kits. I'll build the Academy kit and just transfer the parts for the other kit into that, I wont need landing gear as it has two large sponsons instead although there is beaching gear for it. Getting started wasnt as easy as that though because I needed to blank off the landing gear bay before I start assembling the fuselage! I got started on that today. I opened up the faulty fuselage and I saved the ventral fin and the pilots coaming on the Amodel is better so I cut that out too and the two blank panels covering the landing gear bays. I used the latter to blank-off the landing gear voids. I also had to rub the two circular panels thin around the edges so that the panels will sit flush. I needed to use these as they had the correct curve of the lower fuselage in the plastic, saved having to try and bend little plastic circles! In between painting the Seamew I'll do bits of the Wildcatfish too! I'll have to improvise most of the way because the parts are transferrable but the setting/mounting holes are on the duff kit.