1/72 F6F-5 Drone

[81-er]

This is me tossing my hat into the ring for the first group build I've joined (well, the first to start). I fancied something different to an overall blue or a camouflaged example, and stumbled on a set of decals for surplus Hellcats that had been converted to drones:

 

https://www.modelimex.com/172-decals-grumman-f6f-5-hellcat-drones-hmd-72011

 

I've actually ordered them from the big H, but that site has better images of the options. I'm not sure exactly which number I fancy, though it will be one of the overall insignia red models, I just need to decide which tail colour I prefer. I'll be using the Eduard 1/72 weekend edition kit for my build. I've ordered an Eduard PE interior set and resin wheels, but I think that's going to be the extent of the aftermarket for this one. Part of the idea of entering a couple of group builds is to give me some urgency to get a project completed within a timescale, so keeping things simple seems wise.

 

Right, I'm off to do some research while I wait for the postie

 

James

[Corsairfoxfouruncle]

Do you have an Idea as to which one ? I’m planning on doing one also and wouldn't want to do a duplicate. Im angling for #2 blue tail, #14 pink tail, or #17 green tail. Or as a last choice X3 in overall red. 

[81-er]

I quite like the idea of one of the blue-grey tails (15&16), or the white of 7&8.

[Corsairfoxfouruncle]

4 hours ago, 81-er said:

I quite like the idea of one of the blue-grey tails (15&16), or the white of 7&8.

Thats great then I’ll stick to green or pink. 👍🏻

[Col.]

You've certainly picked a colourful subject for the GB James  

[81-er]

All of my goodies have now turned up, so it’s time for a mammoth update. First up, here’s a shot of what I’ve purchased. I’ve got the Eduard weekend kit, the H-Models Hellcat Drone pt1. decal sheet, Eduard’s Brassin wheels, their pre-painted/shelf-adhesive interior PE set, and finally the Eduard paint masks:

 

 

I accidentally ordered two set of the resin wheels, so I guess that’s an excuse to build another Hellcat one day.

 

The decals look to be nicely printed (excuse the dodgy photography on those), plus the included sheet provides you with colour profiles for the various options. There are numbers for each option of drone, plus decals for the bright yellow control plane, however you only have one set of stencils. You could build a fleet of drones from this sheet, using the stencils from the kit:

 

 

 

I’m sure most of you are familiar with the box contents, however parts come on three grey sprues (labelled A, C, and D, so I’m assuming B is used for some of the variants of this kit), plus one clear sprue. This is my first Eduard kit and I’m very impressed at the quality of the moulding. It’s very detailed and there is very little flash:

 

 

The PE looks nice, if a little small. I can see the magnifier and tiny tweezers being used a lot in this build (slightly manky 2p grabbed off a shelf for scale):

 

 

The wheels are also extremely detailed and well cast, including flat spots:

 

 

On to the actual build, starting with the cockpit. The cockpit floor had some moulding defects around the edge, which were treated to a light sanding. The after shot looks a lot rougher than it actually is:

 

 

 

The next port of call was the IP, which needed all of the moulded instrument detail removing, whilst not damaging the gunsight, for which my micro chisel and skinny sanding sticks came into play:

 

 

I stupidly forgot to take an after shot of that, but as you’ll see later while I thought it looked ok last night, it’s really not.

 

I’d snipped a few more parts from the sprue to mount for painting, then it dawned on me that it probably made far more sense to just hit everything on the sprue and have done with it. With that in mind, I mounted the few pieces I’d separated onto a BBQ skewer and mounted the main “small parts” sprue on another pair. This left me with this lot ready for some primer:

 

 

 

These were then transferred to my state-of-the-art painting facility where robots expertly covered them in two coats of the finest primer (or rather I put them in an old cardboard box in the garage and hit them with a couple of coats of Halfords finest rattle can). It’s not obvious from the photos, but they are a lighter shade of grey now:

 

 

 

 

I decided to take advantage of the fact I’m working from home, so I grabbed a hairy stick and nipped out to the conservatory to put some Mr Hobby H58 interior green on the relevant parts. One advantage of painting in the conservatory is that the paint dries really quickly, so I was able to get a second coat on some bits as they’d already dried by the time I’d finished the first coat on the rest. The downside to painting in the conservatory is that the paint dries really quickly, so you can end up with brush marks if you’re not careful. I really need to save up and get myself an airbrush & compressor. It’s not the most even of coverages, but I’ll stick another coat on later and see if that evens things out. I’m still on the fence on the colour, it looks a lot lighter than some of the references are showing. I might still mix some olive drab or black in to get more of a bronze green.

 

Cockpit walls and cowl internals:

 

 

Rudder pedals (plus a stray hair I need to get rid of:

 

 

 

Cockpit sidewalls and seat:

 

 

Cockpit rear bulkhead/armour plating. You can see a brush mark here from me attempting to add a second coat before the first was properly dry. That’ll teach me to be impatient! I’ll sand it back later:

 

 

Cockpit floor. I’ll add some dry brushed wear later, after I’m happy with the green’s coverage:

 

 

And finally, the IP. This looked ok after I’d removed the kit detail last night, but under the light of day and some paint it’s rougher than a badger’s backside. I’ll treat this to a bit of filler before repainting it:

 

 

My other half’s brother is currently in hospital and in quite a bad way due to mistakes made in his aftercare from an op. That means she’s gone back home to be with her mum for a while and I’m holding the fort down here as we’ve got two twelve-week-old kittens in the house, plus an adult cat that needs daily medication as well. I’ll probably end up making reasonable pace with this at least until she’s back, as it gives me something to do that takes my mind off the situation.

 

In the meantime, onwards and upwards. Until the next update

 

James

[Col.]

Good progress James.

I still have trouble removing well-moulded cockpit details to replace with photo-etch after growing up on kits that hardly had a cockpit far less a detailed one

[81-er]

As Mythbuster's used to say "When in doubt, C4!" 🤣

[81-er]

Two updates in a day? That’s got to be a record for me. I gave the interior parts another coat of interior green at lunchtime, and this is the result. Still a bit rough in a few places), but overall I’m happy with how it’s coming together. I’ve decided I’m going to run with the colour I have, partly as it’s only slightly lighter than the green on the PE, partly because the outside is going to be very bright and cockpit detail may be even harder to see that it’s already going to be if I paint it a darker shade. The back of the cockpit looks like it could still do with another sand, but I’m tempted to leave it and see how it looks with the seat in place. I suspect it won’t even be visible by the time the fuselage is together and the canopy glued in place.

 

Pictures:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The IP got some filler at lunchtime, I’ll sand that off and repaint it tonight.

 

Also in positive news, the future brother-in-law is responding well to treatment. He’s still got a long road ahead of him but this is really good news.

 

Bye for now

 

James

[shortCummins]

I really like the look of some of those drones, which scheme have you chosen? I really like the coloured tail version but I'd struggle to choose which colour!

 

rgds

John(shortCummins)

[Col.]

Two updates in a day? There's a sign of good progress

Glad to hear your partner's brother is on the mend as well.

[81-er]

17 hours ago, shortCummins said:

I really like the look of some of those drones, which scheme have you chosen? I really like the coloured tail version but I'd struggle to choose which colour!

 

rgds

John(shortCummins)

I'm torn between the white or blue grey tail colours. I'm going to order the paint in a bit, so it might come down to what's in stock or flipping a coin

James

[81-er]

A bit more work was undertaken yesterday. First up, I had a go at detail painting the various boxes on the side panels. That didn’t go well and, being honest, I’ve completely ruined them. So they’ll be getting stripped and repainted before I use the kit decals to bring out the details (thanks to Foxbat’s build reminding me that Eduard provides decals for that). I was much more successful with my attempts to add some wear to the cockpit floor and the seat. This was my first attempt at dry brushing and my first attempt at chipping, I’m rather pleased with the results:

 

 

 

 

I reason that by the time an aircraft was converted to a drone it would have been fairly well worn, so the scruffy paintwork adds to the effect.

 

I also painted in the gunsight on the IP and reasoned that while it wasn’t perfect, the fix to the rough paintwork was good enough as it’s mostly going to be covered by PE:

 

 

This was my first time using pre-coloured and self-adhesive PE, before this my only run-in with it was on my Sevans Cybermen as a teenager back in the 90’s. What I can now say is I like pre-coloured PE, but I’m not a fan of the adhesive used. Willing to stick to most things except where I wanted it, then happy to move around as I tried fitting other parts after I’d firmly pressed it home. That said, getting the first piece on made me feel a lot happier about how the IP would turn out:

 

 

Parts 17 & 18 were real “illegitimate children” to get into place. You can see which parts on the instructions below:

 

 

Perseverance paid off though and after getting through this much of the PE:

 

 

Then end result was this:

 

 

And for scale:

 

 

I’ve left off the various levers for the time being, I can just see them being lost forever if I put them on now.

 

My last task for yesterday was to open up the slot for the additional tank, as this seems to have been fitted to all of the drones. I’ve followed the moulded cut lines, however it’s far from symmetrical and I think some fettling will be required. I’ll get the tank put together and then I can find out how much I need to fiddle:

 

 

Finally, a shot of the IP in daylight this morning. I think this will work nicely. It’s not perfect, but realistically I’m still getting back into the swing of this game:

 

 

Bye for now

 

James

[Col.]

That instrument panel will look fine tucked into the cockpit James. Neat work with such tiny parts  

[Thom216]

That shot of flat really toned it down to a more realistic look. Nice job.

[81-er]

43 minutes ago, Col. said:

That instrument panel will look fine tucked into the cockpit James. Neat work with such tiny parts  

Thanks Col. I'm pretty happy with it for a first try at using pre-painted & sticky PE, plus I know what to look out for next time. Shame I didn't look at the other IP before I went to all the effort of hacking the detail off this one, as Foxbat pointed out in his thread, the other IP is flat & detail-free 🤦‍♂️

 

34 minutes ago, Thom216 said:

That shot of flat really toned it down to a more realistic look. Nice job.

There's no flat on this yet, it's just the difference between a night time shot under a lamp and a daylight one. I'll give the whole 'pit a shot of flat once it's together though

 

James

[shortCummins]

very good job on the IP, especially at 1:72.

 

did you decide on the tail colour yet?

 

rgds

John(shortCummins)

[81-er]

Thanks John. I've gone for the blue-grey option, the only decision left to make now is do I go for plane no.15 with the black numerals, or no.16 with the white. As they're otherwise idential this will probably come down to how dark the tail is after painting.

 

James

[81-er]

Last night’s progress started with gluing together the two halves of the external tank. Partly to enable me to check the fit against the opening in the bottom of the fuselage, largely because it was something to test out my newly acquired bottle of Tamiya Extra Thin on:

 

 

While I had the glue out, I glued up the cowl. The fit on this is awful, there’s some pretty big gaps I have to fill and I have to clear off some residue of paint that the TET wicked out of the joint (that’ll teach me to not make sure the mating surfaces are 100% paint free). The seam on the bottom isn’t such a problem as it’s mid-panel, however the top seam lines up with a panel line on the real aircraft so I’ll have an opportunity to practice my resribing and adding back the rivet detail that I’ll lose:

 

 

 

Speaking of filling, there were half a dozen openings that needed to be filled on the underside of the wings:

 

 

It seems odd to me that the opening for the tank in the fuselage needed to be opened up, yet Eduard have decided to mould these open and leave it to the modeller to fill if they didn’t want to build an aircraft that was armed with rockets. They’re also square as well. It would have made more sense in my mind to have left these as something that could be opened up if required, as well as adjusting the mounting method to round pins so you could just drill a couple of holes. The rockets and their pylons are moulded as one anyway, so they’d be just as easy to fit.

 

Moan over, I thought I could minimise the amount of sanding to the filler (and therefore protect that detail) by taping over the outside of the holes and filling from the rear:

 

 

 

After a couple of rounds with the Vallejo Plastic Putty and a cocktail stick used to pop air bubbles and tamp it down, it looked like this:

 

 

Next to get some attention was the tailwheel. It’s not hugely obvious in this photo, but the Brassin wheel is much more detailed that the kit part. The wheel itself is more detail and correct, also the gap between the door and the angled strut is actually a gap rather than a solid lump of plastic. I did think I could drill out the lightening holes, however my smallest 0.3mm drill bit would only fit into the two largest holes:

 

 

Cleaned up and removed from the casting block, I was left with this. Yes, I did manage to snap it while trying to remove it from the block. I’ve repaired it with superglue, hopefully that holds. If not, I might be grateful that I accidentally bought two sets of wheels:

 

 

This morning I unwrapped the cowl; definitely work required:

 

 

 

The story was much the same on the wings. My plan didn’t work so more filling will be required:

 

 

 

My paints have arrived (Tamiya TS49 bright red and Tamiya TS32 haze grey), so I dug through the stash for a suitable test mule. This AT-AT that was abandoned 20-odd years ago was selected as the “victim”:

 

 

The black marks are runs from an attempt at a wash in (I think) acrylic many moons ago. Apart from that, this side was paint free. A quick hit with the red, a couple of hours to dry, then a quick mask from a bit of paper and a strip of Tamiya tape before a pass of the grey left me with this:

 

 

 

There’s a bit more of a blue hue to the grey in reality, so I think that will do. That's only one coat of each colour as well.

 

Colour photos of the tails of these drones are hard to come by, up to now I’d only found one with them parked in a grid and another of the tails of a row of drones taken from the rear left. Today I stumbled on this thread where I found another. Partway down the second set of photos posted by Duggy009 there was another shot of that parked row of tails, but this time from just ahead of the vertical stabiliser looking right. This shot gives the clearest focussed shot of the grey tailed plane no.15 I’ve found so far. While I don’t think the colours I’ve chosen are 100% correct, I think they’re probably about as close as I can get with off the shelf rattle cans (I’m saving for an airbrush & compressor).

 

The final job (so far) was to mask up the cockpit walls for their rear grey section (the paint was still wet when this shot was taken):

 

 

Until next time

 

James

[shortCummins]

making good progress, nice find on the reference photos

 

rgds

John(shortCummins)

[Cookenbacher]

Excellent progress James, great work on the IP and the wear on the cockpit floor.

[81-er]

Not much progress on this of late, life getting in the way. What I have managed to do is plenty of filling & sanding (then more filling and sanding) on the cowl and the external tank. Suffice to say I'll probably need to rescribe and replace rivet detail on the cowl. No photos as it's still a WIP. I've managed to get the wings mostly glued together, I just need to find a suitable way of clamping the tips together enough to not have a yawning chasm before I apply the TET.

 

Hopefully more actual progress and photos soon.

 

James

[shortCummins]

4 hours ago, 81-er said:

Not much progress on this of late, life getting in the way. What I have managed to do is plenty of filling & sanding (then more filling and sanding) on the cowl and the external tank. Suffice to say I'll probably need to rescribe and replace rivet detail on the cowl. No photos as it's still a WIP. I've managed to get the wings mostly glued together, I just need to find a suitable way of clamping the tips together enough to not have a yawning chasm before I apply the TET.

 

Hopefully more actual progress and photos soon.

 

James

have to trie clothes-pegs to clamp the wings together? 

 

rgds

John(shortCummins)

[81-er]

Hi John, I have indeed. It's mainly the outer edge of the tips (in particularly the trailing edge) that's giving me the issue. I've just acquired some locking tweezers however, which appear to be up to the task. I'll report back on the success or failure later

 

James

[shortCummins]

10 minutes ago, 81-er said:

Hi John, I have indeed. It's mainly the outer edge of the tips (in particularly the trailing edge) that's giving me the issue. I've just acquired some locking tweezers however, which appear to be up to the task. I'll report back on the success or failure later

 

James

its all trial and error isn't it? until you find a solution that works for you and often you then think "that was so obvious, why didn't I try that before?"

 

its what makes/keeps the hobby interesting

rgds

John(shortCummins)