F4F Wildcat

 

 This is pretty decent kit with good details, some people have issues with the shape, but I’m not particular and it looks like a wildcat to me.  I happened to have gotten an Eduard set that includes colored cockpit interior, and a full set of PE to underneath the cockpit – as they is ‘opened’ to the undercarriage.  Trust me, it’s not remotely worth it.  The colored cockpit items are nice, but really hard to see once closed up.  The large PE pieces just made it really difficult to close up the 2 fuselage halves, but that could be pilot error.  Regardless, none of it will be visible, even if you shined a pen light into it.  Skip the aggravation – just stick with some seat belts. Ok with that out of the way…  Here’s what the cockpit looks like installed, even before closing up the fuselage, you can see how difficult it is to see inside beyond the seats.

You can see the side panels here, but due to the barrel shape of the plane, once closed up, the sides are almost completely hidden by shadows.

Almost the PE work underneath is invisible once closed up, even if you looked in from the wheel well.

The rest of the build is pretty straight forward, following the kits’ directions.  Decals were nice.  I used Tamiya acryl paint and panel line oil pin washes to finish the outside.  Some weather powders and spot sooting/black oil piant was used for weathering. Watercolor silver pencil was some worn paint area.  If you build this out of the box, it would be a fairly quick and fun build.