Instructions are not that clear in this case, George @gblair
Very nice clamps you have to secure the parts.

George R Blair Jr (@gblair)
You have made some excellent progress on your Panther. It's tempting me to haul out one or two of the 1/48 Trumpeter Panthers I have in the stash. A fellow Imodeler sent me some decals for a Ted Williams Panther, and I have also been wanting to build one for John Glenn. But I'm 99 percent sure one of these was the later F9F-5 so it would involve some mods... and I don't have time for that right now.

So I will have to build vicariously through you. Thanks for the updates ! It's look really good. These Panthers are my favorite jets from this era.

Your 1/48 Panther looks awesome, my friend @lgardner! Looking forward to see it in the headlines!

George R Blair Jr (@gblair)
The only reason why we don't see the warps is because I had to clamp the wings and let them completely dry. Originally it looked more like a F9F "Corsair" the wings were SO badly warped ! 🙂

I completely understand the too many models and not enough time quote. Hopefully soon I will get more of the time available part, since we are almost completed with the restoration work on Sandy's Dakota R/T truck project. Funny thing you mentioned the T-6 / SNJ model. For quite some time I have been wanting to build a model of one that was flown from our local Deland airport during WW2, using a 1/48 Monogram kit in the stash. I'm hoping this one will be fairly straight forward, other than the special markings which I might be able to do using decals from the stash as well... his famous last words of "easy". 🙂

New Smyrna was a smaller "auxiliary" airfield, used to support the larger bases of NAS Daytona Beach, NAS Sanford (where you flew into once), and NAS Deland. This is why it has two letter "A"s present instead of the usual one for it's NAS (Naval Air Station) designator.

There were several other nearby smaller airfields that were used as auxiliary fields too. These were Ormond, Bunnel, and Spruce Creek. I grew up a few miles away from Spruce Creek, and back then it was used for drag racing cars, and for flying RC planes. Now it's a gated golf community where people can taxi their private planes right up to their homes, providing they live next to one of the aircraft taxi ways. Most of the homes are not located right on these taxi way areas, so it's more of a golf community with the bonus of having airplanes.

Spiros Pendedekas (@fiveten)
Thanks for the compliments on my "Brubaker" Panther jet. One of these days I will post it in the headlines. I have quite a few builds that are ready for posting now, but have not yet been.

Hi, Louis (@lgardner): I found a guide to the fuselage codes in a book I had in my library. The codes come from a mid-war directive. The codes are in 3 groups. 1st group is a station code, 2nd group identifies the aircraft's primary use, and the 3rd group is a plane number within the unit. So "DE" = Deland, "N" = trainer, "156" = aircraft number within the unit.

6 attached images. Click to enlarge.

Hi, Louis (@lgardner): I love the various paint schemes on these wartime trainers. In Sullivan's book, he has a black and white photo of the SNJ trainer with the mismatched colors, but he tells us what the colors were. When I later found the color photo online, the colors matched the description perfectly. I don't know if he had access to the color photo or simply interpreted the black and white photo, but he sold me on creating a model of this plane. I need to figure out which model of SNJ it was and see if I have a model that will create it. More fun down the line. The bottom photo is cool. I am pretty sure it was staged, but how often do you see wartime photos of Waves?

Thanks, Gary (@gwskat). I think I am getting too old for 1/72. I built some of the cockpit by feel because I could just barely see the parts. Is 1/72 the one they call "Braille scale"? I know why.