F2H Banshee, 1/72 Hobbycraft

[opus999]

Next out of the gate for me is the early '90's boxing of the Hobbycraft F2H Banshee:

 

 

I've had this kit in my stash since my mid-90's buying spree. I always liked the Banshee and it's older sibling the FH-1 Phantom.  When I was in elementary school and my school library was selling "old" books they didn't want anymore, I snapped up 2 books about airplanes: one about transport planes and this one:

 

 

My dad was a WWII airplane modeler and I had lots of them on my ceiling, so this was my first real taste of the jet-age, so to speak. Truth be told, I liked the FH-1 better than the F2H, but mostly because it's canopy looked more like what I would find on my beloved WWII aircraft.  The Banshee's canopy seemed more "jet age". Actually, my favorite plane in that book was the F4D, but that is a model for another day...

 

This kit starts off (like the B-57 I just finished) with decals that are incredibly out of register:

 

 

 

The yellow is off by maybe a half inch from the white that is supposed to be underneath it. Since it only affects the yellow, and the scheme I'd chosen has yellow tail stripes, I thought maybe I'd paint the stripes on and use the other decals that didn't have yellow.  But then I took a close look at the decals and they just seem... off. They have kind of rough edges and are very matte -- makes me wonder if they'd just break apart in water. Besides, the matte won't work real well with a gloss aircraft. 

 

I really wanted to do a dark blue Banshee, but all the after market decals I could find were for gull gray banshees. Lucky for me I was able to find a sheet from a later boxing of the same kit:

 

 

As an added bonus, the instructions have no painting instructions.  None. So I've had to rely on research for the cockpit colors and that has been a little bit of a puzzle.  Some cockpit photos show the interior as black, some as gray and some modelers (and some model instructions I found at scalemates) show the cockpit as Zinc Chromate.  It could be that all are true of different periods of time.  In the end I went with gray, because that's what the Banshee at the Naval Aviation museum is.

 

I started off by spraying the interior pieces with MRP FS35237:

 

 

The instrument panels were painted black, with dry brushing of gunship gray, then dark ghost gray and finally steel. The instrument panels are not accurate, but I painted red switches about where they would be in the real thing:

 

 

 

The seat has been a bit of a challenge as well because it is not molded accurately.  It has the head rest of a Martin-Baker ejection seat from the Banshee, but the rest of it doesn't look like any Banshee seat I could find. In the end I painted it gray with a black head rest and painted the seat cushions Olive, which kind of matched a couple of the instructions I found.  I'm not going to sweat it too much. I'm still working on it, so no pictures yet.

 

The few pictures of the intakes I found seemed to be the same color as the body, so I painted these parts in preparation of putting the wings together:

 

 

 

 

I used Testors rattle-can enamel Dark Sea Blue thinned with just a couple drops of Mr. Leveling thinner.  Turned out quite glossy.

 

That's all for now!

 

[Andre B]

I always liked the Banshee. It would be fun to make an comparison build one Day between the Airfix and the HC kit...

 

Following with interest!

 

Cheers / André

[Courageous]

3 hours ago, opus999 said:

The yellow is off by maybe a half inch from the white

So much for quality control, how the heck could they have missed that!?

3 hours ago, opus999 said:

It could be that all are true of different periods of time.

I almost had the same dilemma with my FJ-1 and I went with interior green.

Good start. 

 

Stuart 

[Tailspin Turtle]

The most significant error is the nose landing gear, which was not the same as the F2H-1/2’s. Also see https://tailspintopics.blogspot.com/2009/12/f2h-banshee-modeling-notes.html

[opus999]

23 hours ago, Andre B said:

I always liked the Banshee. It would be fun to make an comparison build one Day between the Airfix and the HC kit...

 

Following with interest!

 

Cheers / André

Welcome aboard!  Glad to have you.

 

20 hours ago, Courageous said:

So much for quality control, how the heck could they have missed that!?

 I know, isn't that nuts?

 

10 hours ago, Tailspin Turtle said:

The most significant error is the nose landing gear, which was not the same as the F2H-1/2’s.

Thank you for pointing that out.  Your site is a trove of information too! I'm a little puzzled about how I can fix that -- it seems a tad out of my skills.  Any suggestions? I looked briefly at a couple other builds of the same model to see what they did, but don't have a plan of my own yet.

[opus999]

Did some more detail painting, and also finished the seat.  The seat isn't very accurate based on the pictures and diagrams I've seen, but it will probably be OK since the canopy has a terrible thick part at the top as others have noted in the past.  It warps everything in the cockpit, which may actually be a good thing.

 

 

 

I fabricated the red handles from 0.5 mm styrene rod, but It probably should've been even smaller.  That was the best I could find though.  The seatbelts were made of Tamiya tape painted with Mr. Color and glued on with Micro Krystal Klear. Adding the detail is kind of like putting lipstick on a pig, but I think it improves it somewhat. Besides, those handles are pretty distinctive. I think I need to add a little black to the handles on top because they seem to go back too far.

 

Used some Apoxie Sculpt epoxy putty to fill the holes for the guns in the fuselage. When I dry fit the fuselage, I found I could see daylight when the holes matched up just right, which won't do!

 

 

Finally epoxied some weight in the nose. They recommend 10-15 g, and I measured out 20. That seemed like a lot and I couldn't fit them all in anyway. Well, what I ended up with was about 10, and after taping the whole model together to check the balance, I think it will be more than enough.

 

 

I'd hoped to get the fuselage together tonight, but just ran out of time. Besides, It's probably best to let the epoxy dry first anyway.

 

If anyone has ideas about the nose wheel, I'm all ears.

[Courageous]

3 hours ago, opus999 said:

I fabricated the red handles from 0.5 mm styrene rod, but It probably should've been even smaller.

Get a hold of various size electric cable, very useful for stuff like that and brake lines...

Not having an image of the nose wheel part and an image of the real thing, I can't help.

Good going so far.

 

Stuart

[Terry1954]

I'll tag along here. Always love a navy jet and I have the Sword F2H-2P in my stash, so very interested in this one.

 

Terry

[Tailspin Turtle]

15 hours ago, opus999 said:

Thank you for pointing that out.  Your site is a trove of information too! I'm a little puzzled about how I can fix that -- it seems a tad out of my skills.  Any suggestions? I looked briefly at a couple other builds of the same model to see what they did, but don't have a plan of my own yet.

I don't have the Hobbycraft kit handy but what I would do is simply cut off the fork/wheel from the kit's nose landing gear and glue it at a more vertical angle on the front of the existing strut if it is long enough. I wouldn't bother adding much more than the shimmy damper for detail. Three aspects are visually noticeable though: the slight nose-up "sit" of the -3/4 compared to the -1/2, the angle of the fork, and the location of the nose wheel relative to the nose gear wheel well. Note that as long as you don't "land" the model nose wheel first, there isn't much strength required of the nose landing gear (that's why with too little weight in the nose, the model tips back). For much, much more detail, see https://tailhooktopics.blogspot.com/2019/07/mcdonnell-f2h-banshee-nose-landing-gear.html

[opus999]

9 hours ago, Terry1954 said:

I'll tag along here. Always love a navy jet and I have the Sword F2H-2P in my stash, so very interested in this one.

 

Terry

Welcome aboard! I suspect the Sword kit has much more detail than this one.  I haven't shown off the wheel wells yet! 🙄

[opus999]

5 hours ago, Tailspin Turtle said:

simply cut off the fork/wheel from the kit's nose landing gear and glue it at a more vertical angle on the front of the existing strut if it is long enough

That looks similar to other builds I'd seen.  That's a simpler idea than the one I cooked up in my head on the way home tonight!

5 hours ago, Tailspin Turtle said:

there isn't much strength required of the nose landing gear

That was my main concern, and what was driving my idea to construct something out of slightly beefier materials. But, I will give your suggestion a try!

 

By the way, thank you for the additional link to your site.  I haven't had any time so far today to do any research (darn day job!  ), so this is a big help!

[opus999]

I was looking at the box art for the boxing I have the decals for, and it has silver leading edges.  These can't be bare metal, can they?  I would guess they're some sort of metallic paint?

 

Just trying to decide what paint to use when I get to that part.

[Tailspin Turtle]

1 hour ago, opus999 said:

I was looking at the box art for the boxing I have the decals for, and it has silver leading edges.  These can't be bare metal, can they?  I would guess they're some sort of metallic paint?

 

Just trying to decide what paint to use when I get to that part.

http://tailspintopics.blogspot.com/2012/01/corogard.html

[opus999]

Worked for about an hour last night and got quite a bit done. Tuesday night I'd glued the fuselage together and even though it dry fit together nicely, I manged to get a bit of a gap in the seam along the top. I have difficulties gluing, despite having years of experience. There was a bit of a step in the bottom, and that may have been my fault too.  But at any rate, I got to fill and sand. I finished the filling and sanding (and rescribing the lines across the seam):

 

 

The bottom came out very well too, except for the front wheel well.  I realized if I put filler in there, I won't be able to sand it.  The seam isn't the entire problem, the two halves kind of form a "v":

 

 

Not sure how I can fix it, except maybe glue in some of my paper-thin styrene.  There's no detail anyway so why not?

 

When gluing the wings together, they have you put the intake insert and exhaust insert in first, then glue the wing halves together. Here's the intake:

 

 

The intake inserts don't fit very well, so I had to sand them until they were flush with the wing root.  The first one I did was very bad, the second not so bad.  I forgot to take a picture of the first, but here's the second:

 

 

I also painted the cones in the exhaust with Mr. color super stainless.  It looks better in real life than in the photo for some reason.

 

 

After that I got the wings together and did some filling and sanding on the leading edges.  They weren't really that bad. I ran out of time before I could get the wings on, so I'm off to do that now!

[Corsairfoxfouruncle]

10 minutes ago, opus999 said:

Not sure how I can fix it, except maybe glue in some of my paper-thin styrene.  There's no detail anyway so why not?

I just did that with a Fujimi A-7 and it worked out fine. 

[opus999]

15 minutes ago, Corsairfoxfouruncle said:

I just did that with a Fujimi A-7 and it worked out fine. 

Then I have a plan!  I like the easy decisions.

[opus999]

It occurred to me as I was sanding the wings, that there is a panel missing on the bottom, which would be the door that covers the wheel when retracted.  So I did a little research and broke out the pin vise and made some panel lines for those doors:

 

 

 

Just a couple little "oops"es I need to fix on that.

 

It's starting to look like an airplane!

 

 

[72modeler]

On 7/21/2019 at 10:15 PM, opus999 said:

I snapped up 2 books about airplanes: one about transport planes and this one:

Now I know why my school library never seemed to have this one on the shelf! You knave! (Along with the old William Green Famous Fighters/Bombers that always seemed to be checked out!)

Mike

[opus999]

Painting today! 

 

First though, I forgot to mention last night that the fit of the wings to the body was surprisingly good. Not perfect, but pretty good. In general the wing fits snug to the body, but gives the appearance of a gap because the edges are rounded.  Whether this was intentional or not, I don't know, but in overall appearance the seams don't look much different than the other panel lines.  When I dry fit them, I noticed one wing would have a small step along the seam, so I made sure to hold the wing in place so that the step would be on the bottom of the a/c. Given enough time and effort, this step could be removed, but since it's on the bottom of the plane and it's pretty small, I don't think it will even be noticeable when the dark paint goes on, so I am electing to leave it alone.

 

Now, about painting. I have been thinking about painting since before this build began. It will be my first dark blue Navy aircraft since returning to the hobby, so I had to put a lot of thought into the approach.  I see a lot of folks black base these types of aircraft with a light gray marble coat, leaving the panel lines black.  Those have resulted in some pretty stunning looking builds, but the technique results in a plausible (or believable) finish, but not necessarily an accurate one. I say "not necessarily" because I haven't found evidence of Navy planes of that era having that appearance, because, well, dark aircraft and old black and white photos. So, it could be accurate, or it could not. 

 

In all my research, the Banshees look dark and shiny, without much mottling or dullness. Such as this:

 

McDonnell F2H-2 Banshee in flight (colour)
USN [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

 

I have seen, however, some pictures of them on carrier decks with a light gray residue on them, presumably from the sea spray.  For instance: 

 

 

Which to me, seems to suggest some salt weathering may be in order here.

 

There is also this: 

 

F2H-2s VF-172 on USS Essex (CV-9) c1951
U.S. Navy [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

 

Which also suggests salt weathering, but now I look closer at it, one might be able to achieve the same look by black basing. So, I guess those paint jobs with black basing/panel line shading are accurate. 

 

I looked at a couple painting approaches. First, Rato Marczak did a beautiful job on an F9F, where he elected not to prime the gray plastic and just used white to define the panel lines (https://www.ratomodeling.com/finished/panther_72/).  The end result is very believable. The other approach is much more detailed and color oriented (rather than being weathering oriented): Matt McDougal has a video where he shows how he uses different colors in his marble coat to get subtle tonal variation in his dark sea blue (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmdxyUQdpFw) . I think the results are quite impressive, however I worry that if I take this approach I might achieve a nicely varied top coat, which then will get washed out when I put the bright red decals on. 

 

I think I will do a blend of the two approaches.  The trick is to back off on the final coat so that the effect is not so subtle that the red decals don't totally obliterate the effect.  Which is tough because I always feel like I'm "Overdoing" the effect.

[opus999]

15 minutes ago, 72modeler said:

You knave!

 That's me!  In my defense, they were selling them off for something like a dime (I could be wrong, it was a million years ago), so the fine administrators and Librarians at Marcus Whitman Elementary School are partly to blame.  

[opus999]

Well, that went well and I learned a lot from it! If I have one concern, its that the effect may be too subtle, but we shall see...

 

So, first I needed to mask the cockpit and I decided to mask off the engine cans because I will be using Alclad for those, with a Black Lacquer base and I don't want any interactions with the Dark Blue enamel.

 

 

 

Then I sprayed it with Mr. Surfacer 1500 black decanted from the spray can and thinned with Mr. Leveling thinner, maybe 50/50. As I'd hoped the Mr. surfacer took care of a couple phantom seams that had cropped up.

 

 

I then did a marble coat of Mr. Color Engine Gray, and highlighted with Testors Gunship Gray (darkened with a drop of black), Mr Color Wood Brown, and Testors Rust. The marbling was pretty subtle and next time I do it (particularly if it's a Hellcat or something like that) I will make it a bit darker (that is, make the gray coat thicker so it is a lighter color and provides more contrast).

 

 

 

 

Then I decanted the Testors FS15042  and thinned a little more than 50/50 with Mr. Leveling thinner.  I had to spray it on in very thin coats and slowly build it up. 

 

 

 

 

 

Its hard to take photos of because it's subtle and the reflection from the gloss paint doesn't help!  But hopefully you can get a feel for how it looks.  In real life it looks very believable.  Not too weathered, but with enough subtle change in tone across the aircraft that it looks like a real paint job on a real working aircraft.

 

Unfortunately, with such thin coats of the top coat, it didn't come out very glossy.  Just a semi-gloss that's ever so slightly rough (which I didn't expect because I used so much thinner...). I hope that the Aqua Gloss top coat will make it suitably glossy. Speaking of which, now that the paint is rougher than I expected, I will probably need to put a coat of Aqua Gloss on before the decals.  I'm a little concerned about this because I've found clear coats do funny things to pre-shading.  Sometimes it accentuates them, sometimes it tones them down.  Hopefully it won't tone it down! 😟

 

I'm likely done for the day, and I may not get to the Banshee until Sunday because I want that enamel to fully cure before I start handling it (I speak from experience...).  In the meantime I will do all the fiddly bits and if I finish those before Sunday, maybe start on the cockpit of my next build (F-80C).

[Corsairfoxfouruncle]

I think you have a winner here. 👍🏻

[opus999]

1 hour ago, Corsairfoxfouruncle said:

I think you have a winner here. 👍🏻

Thanks! Me too!  I went down and looked at it with fresh eyes, and it is exactly what I want.

[Corsairfoxfouruncle]

Did you look at her in daylight ? That will really tell you how she looks. 

[mdauben]

I've got a Navy Cougar in my queue, so I'm very interested in how you are doing the dark sea blue paint scheme on your model.