I have a rule, only one 'project' at a time. If that's two or three planes in one theme, that's fine. But recently I've gone away from that with the F6F Diorama still being worked on, an F2G coming towards the end, and of course the F8F in the early stages.

But with Eduard's F4F there's a new kit on show which I've been very excited for since I heard about it months ago. Time to put the other models aside and work on this little thing.

The Kit

Behind the box art we have a lot of plastic. Starting off with the fuselage we see a lot of great detail as expected with eduard, both raised and recessed rivets are here and of course great panel lines. We are reminded if the future of this kit with the print 'F4F-3/3A/4 Early Wildcats'.

Next is the wings, with Eduard's goal of doing a large Wildcat line this is a unique thing to the F4F-3. Later Wildcats would be treated to Grumman'a famous 'Sto-Wing' system, but the F4F-3 has a fixed wing with no folding ability. Whilst I'm interested to see if Eduard will include a folding wing out of the box, or more likely require an aftermarket set to do so, none of that is a concern here in this cat.

The next sprue features a lot of small delicate tubes that will become the detailed and complicated landing gear system. I am worried this will break if a modeler isn't careful. Unfortunately I am not careful and at some point between taking the photos and now I've managed to break a bit of the landing gear legs already. Great! For me however I'll be trying to work out the best way to do an in-flight model anyways.

The next sprue features yet more tiny bits and bobs, with antennas, hooks (only stowed hook in this kit, no down option though I doubt it's hard to scratchbuild that), bomb racks and gun barrels.

The final sprue features the many cowlings of this kit as the F4F-3 changed a fair bit in its lifetime. There's also the propeller and engine, as well as one of three options for the instrument panel (decal/paint and decal/PE).

Of course there are the clear parts with a variety of canopy options, this includes parts for the later FM-2 Wildcat. The parts are crystal clear with very minimal distortion

Being a profipack we also get photoetch and a mask set. After building their A6M2 with a lot of PE I'll be sticking to the plastic with this as I believe it produces a more interesting end result.

And of course we have decals, 1 big sheet, 1 little sheet, and 1 single decal on a tiny sheet. Of course this is the new style decal, register is alright but not amazing. The box art scheme features small star overpainted with large ones which they have done as single decal here, I'm not a fan of it and it should be done with two decals (or paint).

Eduard were certainly in a rush with this kit, I saw on Instagram only 2 weeks ago that they were still posting about the finishing touches. There are a couple of issues in the kit that have been fixed before selling, one is a decal that is incorrect and is solved with a replacement decal included. There's also some missing annotations such as 'drill here, exclude for option A' and a small bit of paper is included to fix this.

Looks like a great kit, let's dive in.

There are many interesting things about this kit. The one that most interested me is that the fuselage is finally accurate, with a higher "turtleback", resulting in a less "squat" canopy. In fact, when I posed the closed canopy in a Tamiya Wildcat model, the top line of the canopy is a full 1/16 in higher than the Tamiya model's. I'm including some shots of actual F4F-3s and a Tamiya Wildcat, so you can see what I am talking about. Overall, looking at the completed model, it's mostly wider at the top, with the upper line of the turtleback not so high. You'll only notice it if you try to mix and match an Eduard canopy with a Tamiya F4F.

Over at The World's Greatest Modeling Site, the World's Greatest Modelers (ask them, they'll tell you) are Extremely Worried that there doesn't appear to be a gas tank under the cockpit, despite Dana Bell posting a couple shots of that area and there isn't a gas tank there because that's not where it was on the F4F-3 (it was to the rear of the cockpit, later moved under the cockpit for CG purposes). Also they're Very Concerned that the gun bay doors are "proud" of the surrounding wing surface. According to Vlad Szulc, who I queried, this is 0.02mm, which cannot be seen in person, though if your fingertips are very sensitive you can feel it if you run your finger over that area. And as a matter of fact, when this came up I queried a friend of mine who owns a tame 1:1 FM-2 and he says that the gun bay covers are slightly "proud" of the surface, to make it easier to open them.

Overall, the Eduard F4F is to the Tamiya F4F as the Eduard P-51D and (new) Fw-190A are to the Tamiya P-51D and Fw-190A - that is, finer fine detail, and more accurate overall shape (if you looks really hard), though more fiddly to assemble.

Also, I'll be doing mine here starting later this week after I get the last "bookazine" turned in to Key Publishing.

6 attached images. Click to enlarge.

First Steps

Well let's get on with bits. This is about as far as I can go without chucking paint on the model.

Back onto the previously mentioned 'very thin parts', the seat which I thought wouldn't be an issue was the first to suffer from the sprue cutters. Never had an issue on that sort of part so I put a tiny amount of sprue-glue/sprue-goo on it and left it a while.

The rear half of the cockpit went together without issue.

Unsurpsingly for Eduard you get the three options of instrument panel. As a comparison I'll do the Photoetch one and the paint + decals one and we'll see what works out best.

Later on I added the seat, the broken bit is not perfectly repaired but since I'll have a pilot in the seat this shouldn't be visible anyways.

We also have the sidewall pieces, lots of buttons and switches but I'm very impressed with the detail here. The instructions tell you to completely remove all of it for some flat 2D photoetch, why would I? This will produce a better end result with some paint.

Here we have an early sighting of our stand in for 'Butch' O'Hare. I don't have a great pilot to use but a Tamiya P-47 or Corsair pilot will have to do. One will go and complete the training for Wildcat and one will go the route for the Bearcat.

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And finally, we got wings. Simple construction but I did have to slightly open up the intakes underneath which were particularly closed up on one wing due to extra plastic, no big issue at all. Photoetch is used in the intakes but it's barely visible. Again, no folding wing so these very simply slot onto the side of the aircraft as they are with a small spar piece for strength.

Next up is to put some paint. Black first as always, followed by bronze-green on the cockpit area and the 'Grumman Grey' everywhere else. On later Wildcats interior green replaces the bronze which may be soemthing to keep in mind if you reading end up getting the FM-1/2 kits in the future (I know I will!). If doing the F4F-3 in the Pre-War bright scheme of a very early 1940s Wildcats the instructions call for silver in all areas, I'm not sure if this accurate or not as I haven't done the research on those very early cats. One key bit that I need to work on is that wheel bay, but thats a situation of paint first assemble second.

Thanks for the information Tom. As with all things scale modelling, 100% realism often doesn't produce an amazing model. Moaning about slightly raised gun bay doors and some raised rivets on the wing makes no sense to me, the idea of panel lines being as visible as they are on our kits isn't realistic either nor is having visible rivets if viewed from any sort of distance other than arms length from the real plane. If a 0.02mm raised panel or rivet upsets people then they're more than invited to sand and fill in every hole and line on the kit for the authentic viewing distance realism, but I'll enjoy the benefits of having clear detail on our fun little hobby. That being said the rivets on the wing are approaching the territory of being slightly too big for me, but they're right on the fine line. They're certainly not Airfix Vintage Hurricane in 1/72 level of rivets as found on some other Eduard kits such as the Tempest Mk.V and Spitfire Mk.I.

Harvey, excellent progress so far, I'll definitely stay tuned for this one.

As for the "experts" comments, Harvey you took the words right out of my mouth in bringing up the panel lines... Most excellent rebuttal.

Busy day, but managed to get some paint on the plastic before I needed to head out.

First Paint

A pair of paints heavily featured in this build will be these two MRP products, Blue-Grey and Light Grey. This will be the base for the exterior paint scheme but also has other uses.

Using an old paint brush I made a totem pole by added duct tape and various bits of plastic, giving them a coat of black. This was a little trick I stole from some Japanese modellers and comes in very handy with these initial stages of small sub-assemblies.

All the interior pieces were first painted in a black, but I've also gone on to add the 'Grumman Gray'. It's not immediately clear what colour this is and I've always assumed it was a unique mix, but upon a bit of diving it seems to just be leftover Light Gray paint used on the underside but painted over areas of the plane that were painted in Zinc Chromite. Whilst this won't be visible in all likelyhood, the fuselage is the first to receive this treatment.

The Cowling was also assembled, there's a few different versions of the cowl included allowing you to make early/mid/late Wildcats of both American and British use. The cowl engine panels feature a slight texture, its barely noticeable but a nice touch. I wonder if it will be at all visible once the model is primed and painted.

The cockpit also recieved a silver coat over the black. I'll likely use a Tamiya mix for the bronze-green cockpit, so a stronger underlying coat of MRP silver should be able to survive some attacks with cocktail sticks, sanding sticks, and a knife in order to show some chipping.

Finally whilst I said it was going to be better to paint seperately, I've changed my mind and begun to assemble the wheel-well structure and then painted it in the 'Grumman Gray'. I doubt much if any of this will be visible when I put the wheels up, but I want to see how all aspects of this new kit go together. It's certainly quite fiddly here and the small tubes are very delicate.

Detail continues to amaze, Harvey (@scalerambush). I suspect some of gear mechanism will be visible through the big fuselage openings for the wheels, but only if you pick the plane up and look directly into the wheel bay, which I don't think will happen with casual lookers. Paint looks great, looking forward to seeing the completed and weathered cockpit.

Harvey: All Grumman Wildcats and Martlets have Bronze Green cockpits and light grey wheel wells (underside grey). The GM-built FM-1 and FM-2 have Interior Green cockpits and underside color wheel wells. All Grumman-built Martlets are painted in correct Extra-Dark Sea Grey, Dark Slate Grey and Sky (Grumman had the paint mixed to FAA specs). All GM-built Martlet/Wildcats used "Lend-Lease equivalent" colors of Neutral Grey for EDSG, Olive Drab for DSG and "sky grey" for Sky.

Also all F4F-3s only have the wide lap belts. F4F-4s have that also until they were given shoulder harnesses in May 1942 in time for Midway.

Information for everyone building Wildcats.

For anyone who didn't notice in the sprue shots, there is definitely an FM-2 on schedule, since the taller rudder is already on the sprue.

Main bay and cockpit look superb, my friend @scalerambush!