Launching a P-47 and F6F

Production rarely stops here at 72 Land Industries, and even when we were experiencing the ISP meltdown work continued. Today a couple of new kits entered at the beginning of the production cycle: the Eduard F6F3 Hellcat and the Sword P-47N.

To be honest, I don’t have a great deal of interest in the Hellcat. I built one in the early days of my return to modelling (I think it was the Hasegawa kit) and put it in an overall Gloss Sea Blue paint scheme. I figured that would be it unless I someday felt the need for an FAA version. But then the Eduard kit came out. It is being hailed as one of the best kits in the last decade or so. So I looked at it a bit closer. In the process I discovered that I had a copy of the Draw Decals sheet for the F6F3 racer “Little Nugget”. I broke down and ordered a copy of the kit during the Great Models dissolution sale. It is a one-color (white) paint scheme, though even the decals themselves remark on how delicate and prone to destruction the gold leaf on the markings are. So that may be a nice little disaster awaiting me in the future. But at this point all I have is a cockpit.

The Sword P-47N was another impulse purchase during that sale. It too has been getting some good reviews. I built one of the Italeri P-47Ns, and even I could tell that something wasn’t right (and for someone who lists detail accuracy fairly low on the list of important things for a kit to have, that is saying something). So I’ll have to physically compare the two once the Sword kit is built and see where the differences are. I have a number of decal sheets for P-47Ns, so markings are not decided on, though I do have the Aztec sheet for “Red-E-Ruth” with a nicely put together cheesecake shot for the nose art.

And in an effort to reduce the residents of the Shelf of Shame, I have pulled down the Italeri Me-323 and will make an effort to finish it up. I got stalled on another nasty masking job (painting the sides of the fuselage with all those underwing struts in the way) but am determined to push this one past the finish line. And is that an A-7 lurking in the paint queue?