Thanks, Eric (@eb801), Tom (@tcinla), Spiros (@fiveten), and John (@johnb). I am excited about the Cutting Edge resin set coming in. It should be here by Friday, so I plan to do some preliminary work on the fuselage. The positioning pins inside the fuselage will need to go, as will the float. The main float, as well as the wing floats, have been a problem area in many of the builds reviews I have read, but I get to eliminate them for this land-based version. I am not planning to sand off the lightly raised panel lines and rescribe the plane. I think it will be OK after some priming, pre-shading, paint, and weathering. I found the Cutting Edge cowling at Rare-plane Detectives for a few dollars. I also found an R-985 resin engine on Ebay, which should be here soon. Tom, I had already found your build review on MM, which is one of the reasons I was trying to find the Cutting Edge set. I had similar thoughts about adding all of these expensive resin parts to a "$12" kit. I bought the Kingfisher when it first came out and have been dragging it around all of these years, but I don't even want to add up today's cost for the Cutting Edge interior, cowling, and replacement engine. It makes my hands shake just thinking about using these parts in the model. Maybe I should just put the parts in my display case. :o)

Thanks, Louis (@lgardner). This is a great time to be a modeler, but things can get tough when it comes to older kits. This Cutting Edge set is the only one I could find anywhere. Aftermarket stuff can get very scarce.

The wheeled kingfisher is a great choice. I saw an old WWII era training film on YouTube a while back that was demonstrating dive-bombing tactics. The aircraft doing the practice bombing runs? A wheeled kingfisher!

Cutting edge interior arrived today. This is like waiting for Christmas: I don't want to play around with the new resin until I finish the F9F I started to kill time waiting for the resin to arrive. I thought I would be done with the F9F before the resin got here, but it arrived early.

1 attached image. Click to enlarge.

This will definitely improve the Kingfisher further, George @gblair

Hi, Louis (@lgardner):
You have the correct movie: Captain of the Clouds, or it could be Captains of the Clouds. Lots of great, very colorful planes. Several dfferent types. One of the actors actually plays himself. Billy Bishop was a WW1 ace, and was an actual Air Vice Marshall when this was filmed, and he played himself. We probably recorded the movie at the same time. I got mine from TCM during their Memorial Day War Movie Marathon. I got 3 or 4 movies that weekend. I watched another one today: Back to Bataan with John Wayne.

Another movie to get if you haven't seen it is called "Report from the Aleutians". This is a documentary filmed in 1943 on Adak Island, where my dad was stationed for a short time at the start of the war. It was filmed by John Huston. Lots of really cool planes, including P-39s, P-40s, B-24s, Venturas, and several others. If you have never seen fighters takeoff on a runway that is covered in water deeper than the wheels, then this is movie for you. It is on one of the streaming services, but I don't remember which one.

If I am reading the reviews correctly, I think the problem with the Monogram float is that it is too small. Apparently the shape is pretty good. There is apparently an additional problem with the wing floats. I guess the actual floats were slightly nose high on the wings to keep them from digging in during a water landing, but the model floats are level with the horizon. Easily fixed by shortening the front struts a little, but avoided entirely by making a landplane. I am so used to seeing a Kingfisher with floats that it is intriguing to build one without a float.

I hope to finish my 1/72 F9F in the next few days and start on the Kingfisher. I promised myself I wouldn't start playing with the cool resin until I was done with the Panther.

Have a good rest of the weekend. Cheers.

Good progress, my friend @gblair! The resin cockpit bits look really nice!

Thanks, Spiros (@fiveten) and John (@johnb). Getting it all installed should be fun, but it is coming along.