A Clowder of Wildcats

[Jb65rams]

I have always had a spot spot for the Wildcat, but to date have never built one. The Wildcat always struck me a rugged, purposeful little fella.

I hope to put this right with this group build.

 

My proposed builds are

1/48 Hobby Boss F4F-3, with yellow wings.

1/48 Hobby Boss F4F-3S, the Wildcatfish

1/48 Tamiya F4F-4, with Wolfpack Designs folded wings.

 

If it ok with the host, I would like to document the builds in a single WiP, as I plan (ambitiously) to build them simultaneously.

 

[PlaStix]

Sounds like an ambitious project! 

Kind regards,

Stix

[TEMPESTMK5]

Good evening JB

 This trio is perfectly qualified for this GB  and I am looking forward to see the start of you build ...

 

Cheers

Patrice

[stevej60]

Great choice JB,I was tempted by HB's yellow wing's Wildcat but opting for Tamiya's kit instead.

[MarkSH]

This will be an interesting tri-build.

 

A clowder, good name I'd never heard it before and had to google it however, and found some synonyms, I particularly liked Glare.....'A Glare of Grummans' sounds menacing.

 

Cheers, Mark.

[Silenoz]

godspeed with this one... nice trio

[dnl42]

Nice! I must say I prefer the HB Wildcats.

 

BTW, do ignore HB's suggestion of white or some other color for the control surfaces of the Wildcatfish, they're just fabric-covered. You can see that in the available photos. ISTR there were also color issues with the fins on the stabilizer.

Edited October 16, 2018 by dnl42

[gingerbob]

2 hours ago, MarkSH said:

A clowder, good name I'd never heard it before and had to google it however, and found some synonyms, I particularly liked Glare.....'A Glare of Grummans' sounds menacing.

Like this:

 

or this:

 

 

Sorry, couldn't think of particularly annoyed Wildcats offhand!

[MarkSH]

Yeah, they're spot on, really menacing glares!

[dnl42]

There are photos on this page that show HB's color issues with the control surfaces and ventral fins. There's more good Wildcat info on that page, too.

HTH

-- 

dnl

[Jb65rams]

@dnl42 thanks for the link, some nice photos there.  Also thanks for the heads up on the colour references.

 

@MarkSH, @gingerbob A glare of Grummans sounds good, really like the look of the Tiger.

 

No progress to report, beyond taking the sprues out of their plastic bags.

 

Hope to start sometime next week when my 11^th Hour entry is completed.

 

 

[Jb65rams]

Here are the kits I am using.

 

1/48 Tamiya F4F-4 with Wolfpack Designs resin wingfold.

 

1/48 Hobbyboss F4F-3

 

1/48 Hobbyboss F4F-3S. The main differences from the F4F-3 are different wings, tail, cowling and of course the floats.

 

Made a start, plan is to work on all three at once. Starting with the cockpits / wheel well.

[stevej60]

Good choice looking forward to this,I like the look of HB's early schemed version.

[Hewy]

Good gracious, the way i operate this would be nigh on impossible, brave,  brave man

[PlaStix]

..........one for each kit...............

[Jb65rams]

The Hobbyboss kits are coming on nicely, assembled quite quickly.

 

 

Started surgery on the Tamiya Wildcat to install the folded wings.

 

 

Just tried dryfitting the resin wingfold, discovered I should have read the instructions more thoroughly before putting saw to plastic and fitting the belly to the rest of the fuselage. Looking at the resin I should have taken more plastic off, it needs a bigger slot than the original kit provided, so now trying to remove this plastic in-situ. Although better to position of needing to remove plastic rather than trying to put it back.

[Hewy]

The fleet is taking shape well, hobby boss details are very nice, and a great job so far, but as with many hb kits, is there a much dry fitting to achieve a fine fit, compared to tamiya's usual almost fall together fit, from my experience, a little more care must be taken, like a game of chess, you have to plan a few moves ahead, or in my case employ a clairvoyant 😁

[Jb65rams]

On 11/14/2018 at 5:50 PM, Hewy said:

The fleet is taking shape well, hobby boss details are very nice, and a great job so far, but as with many hb kits, is there a much dry fitting to achieve a fine fit, compared to tamiya's usual almost fall together fit, from my experience, a little more care must be taken, like a game of chess, you have to plan a few moves ahead, or in my case employ a clairvoyant 😁

it is an interesting experience building them alongside each other. I don't think there is a lot in it when it comes to fit. I preferred the way Tamiya did the wings as a single lower piece (I just made it difficult for myself by electing to install a wingfold). I did find that Tamiya's undercarriage was easier to assemble than HBs, even though the parts look very similar.  In fact I struggle so much with the undercarriage for the HB F4F-3 that I ended up using the spares from the Wildcatfish, this was a slightly harder plastic and I found went together better.

 

I wasn't looking forward to attaching the floats, but found the fit really good, fixed the struts to the floats and then offered them up to the wing. The insert slot on the wing held the float securely while you lined up and glue the butt joints to the fuselage.

 

After a lot of scrapping / sanding I finally got the fold wing inserts to fit

 

All three are now in the paint shop for primer.

Edited November 18, 2018 by Jb65rams
Forgot to add photo

[PlaStix]

Excellent progress JB - they seem to be going together very well!

Kind regards

Stix

[dnl42]

Your clowder of Wildcats is growing nicely! 👍

 

I remember that concern about attaching the floats to the Wildcatfish; glad you had the same experience I did!

[Duncan B]

I really like the HBB Wildcats, they are cheap, fun and look great when finished. I haven't built the Tamiya kit but it's on the to do list. I also like the look of that Wolfpack wing fold kit. It looks much easier to fit than the Aires one (which I used on a HBB Kit which made things more difficult for me).

These are going to be impressive when completed.

 

Duncan B

[stevej60]

Great progress on all three JB,love the look of the Wildcatfish can't wait to see it finished.

[Jb65rams]

@PlaStix  @dnl42  @stevej60 Thanks.

 

@Duncan B agree the Hobbyboss kits are nice. I really like the Wolfpack Designs wing folds, I find them much easier to use than the etch wing folds. Also as they generaly supply a replacement resin wing, I find it makes it easier to cut the kit wing to the bit you need to keep than trying to cut accurately along panel lines.

 

The wildcats are now primed, now to bit I not looking forward to, painting the yellow wings, struggle to get solid even coverage. So I am going to try something different, can't remember the thread I saw this on, they undercoated the yellow with pink.

 

I give you a wildcat with squid pink wings. Will see if it works later in the weekend.

 

 

 

[MarkSH]

Very interesting, quite often in painting, as in artistic type painting, the artist will employ complimentary colours to darken primary colours; so for darkening reds use greens, blues use orange hues and for yellows use purples and vice versa. Obviously the darkening colour is a secondary colour mixed from the remaining two primaries and should have a bias to the general hue of the colour. Pink isn't very far away from purple so it would work in a similar fashion I'm really interested to see how it works especially after a single coat.

[Jb65rams]

6 hours ago, MarkSH said:

Very interesting, quite often in painting, as in artistic type painting, the artist will employ complimentary colours to darken primary colours; so for darkening reds use greens, blues use orange hues and for yellows use purples and vice versa. Obviously the darkening colour is a secondary colour mixed from the remaining two primaries and should have a bias to the general hue of the colour. Pink isn't very far away from purple so it would work in a similar fashion I'm really interested to see how it works especially after a single coat.

It seemed to work. I am very happy with the result.