Hi all, up until now I have been a dedicated armour guy, with a definite slant towards WWII German subjects and have been active on the Armorama forum since late 2013. Well, at our last IPMS meeting, some of the airplane guys convinced me to join their Hellcat group build, so here I am building a wing thing! They are all doing Eduard Hellcat kits, so I picked up Eduards F6F-5 1/48 scale ProfiPACK Hellcat kit and we'll seeehow it goes...

It came with the Quickboost resin engine and drop tank:

Got started on the cockpit. The kit comes with PE instrument panels, so I scraped off the molded on detail and masked off the areas the PE will be glued to with blu-tac prior to painting.

Cheers

Great start and welcome to the darkside! This now opens up whole possibilities to build things that kill armour from the air! You know just saying.

An excellent kit to start with. I think it's the world's only accurate looking Hellcat IIRC. I have one on the go, but life, stuff and things.

Hi Colin , will follow along on your build .

What part of Alberta do you hail in ?



Terri

Hi Terri, I am in Edmonton, beautiful Zero you just finished!

"The kit comes with PE instrument panels, so I scraped off the molded on detail and masked off the areas the PE will be glued to with blu-tac prior to painting."

I am so stealing this. Cheers, Colin, and enjoy the build!

I'm in Edmonton as well . Thank -you



Terri

Terri, you should come out to some of the IPMS meetings and show off some of your work!

Finished off the cockpit bits, some of the PE is diabolically tiny!

And everything ready to go together:

Cheers

Great cockpit so far Colin! It's really coming together well and it looks like Eduards interior green is close to the colour you've painted the pit. Just how close is the match? Eduard's prepainted etch previously has had some large differences in colour.

Thanks Chris! I used Testors Model Master interior green laquer, it is a pretty close match, but i ended up repainting the green parts of the PE anyway.

Nice start in the pit Colin .




Terri

Thanks, here it is assembled, and I have assembled it with the main fuselage halves, taped up and drying now.


Cheers

Colin,
That interior is excellent!

Gaz

Thanks Gaz & Terri!

So, I ordered a set of wing guns from Quickboost to replace the kit ones which are a tad soft in the detail department. so while I wait for those I decided to tackle the resin Quickboost engine that cam with the kit. Cleaned off the casting blocks and added pushrods from brass rod, ignition ring from 0.3mm solder, inter-ear drain tubes amd rocker drain suction line from copper wire. I have drilled out holes for the ignition lines on the ignition ring and on the individual cylinders. I will run these with copper wire after painting.

Cheers

Some nice detail to the engine, Colin. Must have good eyes to drill that bit of solder.

Gaz

Bad eyes, good magnifying lamp

Nice detail work so far Colin



Terri

I have custom made reading glasses 4.82X. The working distance is 20cm. They enable to thread .5mm brass tube. I still find some tasks to challenging dexterously.

Painted and worked on the engine ignition lines. For the ignition lines I used fine copper wire and bundled 2 lines per cylinder together with aluminum tape:

I then insert and glue these into the pre-drilled holes in the ignition ring and then into the ignition points on the cylinder heads:

Once all that was done I touched up the paint and added some oil washes to bring out the details and calling the engine done (still need to drill out and add a rod for the prop hub):

Going to work on some other small bits while I wait for the wing guns. The control surfaces are molded separately but fixed position so I think I may modify them to show some droop.

Cheers

Engine looks nice and busy, now.

Gaz

Second this , nice job on the detailing Colin .




Terri

Thanks, I think the hard bits are done now!

A little bit more done, have been preoccupied with a tracked thing and a wheeled thing. The kit comes with separate elevator control surfaces, but they come with a locating tab and pin so there is no option for assembling them in anything but the zero position.

I want to build this with some of the 'droop' that is normally seen on parked Hellcats, so time for some minor day surgery...I cut the locating tab and pin off the elevator and cut out the slots for the hinges. New hinges were made and now I can add the proper amount of droop.


More to come...

Your hinge line looks great!