Matchbox 1/72 F4U-4 VF-74 Korea

Starting point: one ancient disassembled Matchbox kit, several spare parts and spare AD-4 decals. Turns out I have parts of three Matchbox F4U-4’s, didn’t remember I had that many...

After the oven cleaner routine the first job is improving the chin inlet by grafting in a leftover Italeri F4U-7 chin inlet. Cowling not yet separated from fuselage.

Both the Matchbox and Italeri R-2800 are useless. However, the spares box yielded a leftover resin R-2800 aft cylinder row which got upgraded to a front row with a modified Matchbox reduction gear box. Propeller got fixed, cowling is taking shape.

A basic cockpit was fashioned around the kit seat, wings were reassembled and wheel wells boxed in.

Detailing wheel wells and engine, fixing damaged edges of wheel well openings, plugging 20mm gun barrel openings.

Painting the cockpit, engine painted and installed. Getting the feeling that the intake is not looking quite right...

Added zero length launchers to wing, opened up tail wheel well.

Detailing the tail wheel well, quite an easy job and big improvement.

Assembly time! Dry-fitting of the cowling and comparing to pictures convinced me the chin inlet was to deep. Darn.

No worries, with a few strokes of the razor saw the inlet lip was removed, another section of a Matchbox cowling ring was grafted in and the lower lip was reduced in heigth and reinstalled.

Cowling installed, gaps around lower inlet lip filled with plastic bits.

This 40-someting year old plastic has some surprises, while installing the stabilizers the fuselage just snapped when I applied pressure. Duh..

Tail back on again, fairing in the lower engine cowl. I couldn’t figure out the correct lower cowling shape from pictures but it looks good enough to me.

Canopy polished, installed and masked. Unfortunately it is the early type canopy which doesn't match the subject I chose. Transparency is not what I would like either but hey, that’s what you got to live with when rebuilding. Primer coat on.

Sprayed yellow for the squadron markings. Started on the ordnance, also from the Italeri F4U-7. Ready for the blue main coat.

Main coat on, used Vallejo Air gloss Sea Blue. Looks OK, could have lightened it a bit.

Decaling started. Raided the decal spares, had to cut away the blue surround of the star & bar.

Fiddled around with lots of small numbers from AD-4 serials and managed to approach my subject serial. Eagle eyed readers will spot the tiny AD-4B decal...

Tail code was cut down to size, combined digits for a/c number, had to fashion a cowling “4” from strips of white decal. Finished off with a satin coat and a matt anti-glare panel.

Weathered with light gray pastel and dry-brushed exhaust streaks. Installing patched up landing gear legs.

Installing wheels, bit of a challenge with rebuilds like this.

Adding retraction struts, wheel doors, drop tanks and antennas, decided to forego installation of other ordnance, kinda liked the clean look.

And finished! Not bad for a 40-something years old piece of junk from the bottom of the scrap box 🙂.

Comments

21 April 2019, 09:27

Hans Zwetsloot
Hi there, after my marathon B-52F build I started up a few smaller projects, including this rebuild of a very old 1/72 Matchbox F4U-4. It dates back to the hand-painting days of my youth and was already rebuilt once during that time. On a whim I checked out my spare decals and discovered I should be able to cobble together a set of Korean War markings for it so I decided to give this rather hopeless case another go and do a full rebuild. Hope you enjoy it.

21 April 2019, 09:34