I just completed a Terry Patrick F7F Tigercat resin model kit.
The caveats – I purchased this kit several years ago as Terry Patrick was thinking of leaving the model kit casting business. This particular mold was past its prime and had already been retired by Terry. In addition, Terry does not normally supply any extras and the parts I received are his basic "kit". I believe a current version of the model is available from Airalex with added parts and decals.
The kit arrived as 4 pieces: a fuselage, two wings and a tailplane. There was some gaps at the mold seams and a few air bubble holes. This kit did not come with reference materials and should be rated as hard, as there are no reference points on the fuselage for where to attach the wings or tailplane. In addition the tail plane had to be attached by drilling an appropriate sized and located hole through the fuselage.
Other than the gaps on the fuselage seams and some air bubbles, the castings were fairly clean. The tailplane had one large piece of casting flash in the center but the wing and engine pieces were particularly clean.
In hindsight, I should have installed the tailplane second, but in this case I drilled and placed the tailplane first by comparison with several 3-view drawings re-scaled to 1/144 and printed out. The hole was made by drilling several holes with a Dremel, connecting with a reaming bit and then finishing with some mini-files. The hole was intentionally made slightly taller than the tailplane to allow some leeway in placement. After inserting the tailplane, the gap was sealed with green two-part epoxy. After it had set, the seams were then filleted by 5-minute liquid epoxy.
According to the diagrams there is a slight cant to the wings and this was a achieved by lightly sanding the ends of the wings until the approximate angle was achieved. The location of the wings was determined by careful comparison with various diagrams and two holes drilled through the fuselage. Two short pieces of floral wire were epoxied through the holes to form the wing attachments. After the epoxy had dried, the positions of the wing holes was determined and two holes drilled into each wing. The wings were then epoxied onto the fuselage and after dry, the wings filleted with more 5-minute epoxy.
Prop spinners were created by drilling a small hole down the center of the engine and epoxying a short length of floral wire to each engine. This formed the core the spinner and a small dab of green epoxy putty was molded around the wire to form the hub.
The mounting system is a 1/16" ID aluminum tube embedded in the underside of the fuselage with epoxy and ground flush with the bottom.
The aircraft was primed with black, then painted overall English Navy Blue. Canopy is light blue with medium blue shading and light gray and white highlights. Prop spinners are black. Decals from True North. Panel and flap lines drawn with 0.5mm pencil.
In the end, it turned out that the tail plane was not quite horizontal, which was more obvious after I had attached the wings. Thus if I build the other Tigercats, I will attach the tailplane after I have attached the wings to help in aligning them better in the horizontal plane.
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-Binhan
finds himself in the Workbench with several 15mm scale Russian WWII fighters...
