1/72 Academy Grumman Martlet II

Hello, fellow members of iModeler.

This time I’m showing my recently finished Grumman Martlet II in 1-72 scale. It was built using the Grumman F-4F Wildcat kit from Academy. This kit was designed to be finished with markings from the US Navy operating over the Atlantic Ocean. However, when I saw a coloured profile of a Grumman Martlet II finished as a night fighter from the WW2 RAF desert air force, I decided to finish my kit this way (fortunately, the aircraft of the profile doesn’t have serial number nor “Royal Navy” signs.)

Later I found an article written in Spanish by a modeler who modified his Academy Wildcat to portrait a Grumman Martlet operating with the RAF desert air force. The main modifications are:

• The elimination of the panel lines corresponding to the wing fold mechanism

• The elimination of the outer machine guns of the wings, and the panel lines associated with them

• Changing the three-panel per side configuration of the cowling to a one panel (whose length is 1.5 times the length of one of the original panels) per side configuration

I carried on all these modifications. I also glued a little and thin piece of metallic guitar wire over the top of the tail fin to represent the rear antenna mast, and replaced the kit’s big bulbs that represented the wings’ navigation lights with smaller ones that I made using 2-part epoxy glue. I also scratchbuilt the two exhaust tubes, which where absent in the kit. In the abovementioned article the modeler also added a lot of detail inside the cockpit. However, I just added a pilot figure taken from an Airfix kit.

This is the third WW2 RAF desert air force airplane kit that I’ve finished this year. However, I painted this one with slightly lighter shades of dark earth and mid stone. As the abovementioned coloured profile shows only the port side of the airplane, I had to search at the internet coloured four-view drawings of a Martlet painted with RAF desert air force colours, to use them as a guide for painting the camouflage pattern of my kit.

For the markings, I had to use decals from other kits. In the case of the “F” characters, I had to cut two “E” decals of the appropriate size to convert them to “F” decals. In the case of the top main wing roundels, the decals (which were taken from a very old kit) disintegrated when I tried to apply them to my model. Therefore I had to mask and airbrush blue circles over each main wing. I had two red square decals that I thought I could use to obtain the small red circles located over the center of the blue circles, but they broke after I applied them to my model, so I had to overpaint the red circles with a brush. The decals for the underwing roundels and for the fin insignias that I used had small offset white edges that I had to eliminate by overpainting them.

I added a very subtle weathering to my finished model: some paint chipping, exhaust and machine gun stains, highlighting the control surfaces’ panel lines with an enamel wash, and highlighting the remaining panel lines with a drawing pencil. The antenna wires were made from nylon thread. I include several photographs of my model, and also the coloured profile that was my initial inspiration.

I hope that you’ll appreciate my model. Your comments are welcome.

9 additional images. Click to enlarge.