Shading looks great, Harvey (@scalerambush). I just got a great set of decals for 1/48 Wildcats from Fundekals. Their sheet has a ton of options, as well as 36 online pages of documentation, including period photos. I have used them before and their decals worked great. I plan to use them on my Wildcat, when I get around to it. Looking forward to the rest of the build.

Really nice work, Harvey @scalerambush
The red/white rudder looks superb and you approach to get it masked worked very well.

Paint effect on the panels looks terrific, Harvey (@scalerambush), as well as the great work on the rudder. I really hate to do all the measuring and cutting to paint something like the tail, so well done on some fiddly work. I can use Vallejo Model Air in a pinch, but thinning and spraying regular Vallejo is a real stretch for me.

This is really looking good. I too have banned the V paints from the airbrush as I haven't fully appreciated their correct use - happy to brush paint small items with it though. Might have another go with plenty of water after seeing your very succesful use @scalerambush.

Its been a slow few days, I like to leave my decals to sit for the best part of a day and same with any washes, but finally an update and a quite different looking model!

Applying Decals

Time to deal with Eduard's decals. The way they've handled this is a little strange, it seems you get enough stars for 3/4 different Wildcats. On the subject of the small fuselage stars with the red dot you get two pairs that to my eye are identical in size and style, and another pair of different sized one, and a pair for later on with the dot removed.

The same goes for the wing stars, off of memory there are at least 6 different early stars all with the exact same dimensions. Maybe there is a small difference and red circle is slightly smaller, but I stared at them for a while and couldn't notice a thing.

In the end I actually switched out the intended decals for this scheme with other identical stars from another scheme. Why? Well, quite frankly a few random stars are quite poorly registered for what one would expect from a 2022 release, and it just so happened that the stars for scheme C were those poorly registered ones on my sheet. I do miss the old cartograf.

With the decals on a bed of Mr.Marking Setter and given nearly 20 hours worth of micro-set/sol to settle, I went about removing the film. I find this to be worth doing as the film on Eduard's decals can be quite thick especially at the edges and often I can see one side of the decal having raised film where I've cut it from the sheet. In general removing the film went without issue, a couple of ripped bits here and there but they're minor enough I may not fix them.

Now we can clearly see what Wildcat I went for, and I had to go for F-15 which is listed in the Medal of Honor citation. No photos exist of it which is a shame. To make the F-15 I used generic number decals previously purchased for the F4U-1C combined with the F- from the Eduard kit. For the nose numbers I just so happened to have an F4U-4 decal set which had a serial ending in 51, which was just the right size to be cut apart and placed.

The generic numbers weren't as white as the eduard ones, so after the model got a gloss coat for weathering wash I simply masked over them and resprayed them to bring them more in line with the eduard letter.

Stencils? Don't know what you're on about. That's a nice thing about aircraft as the earlier you go the less stencils you'll encounter.

I used the last of my Florymodels dark dirt wash on this cat, whilst the change isn't the most obvious it has made a difference when viewing up close.

On top of this I also painted up and added the wheels. I sanded them roughly in half to get them to fit a bit better to what I can see in reference photos.

And with that we have the current state of the Wildcat. Time to do some more specific weathering, I've also decided to paint on the anti-slip walkways, whilst F-1 and F-13 in that photo don't have them, F-5 at the bottom of the ocean does. In general I find with US Navy aircraft that any sort of anti-slip walkways are inconsistent with whether they're on the aircraft or not, not particularly sure why it's so random.

You're headed toward a very nice result, Harvey.

Well done, Harvey (@scalerambush). The early planes with the striped tails always look cool. I have started to use Flory washes more and more. I didn't like them at first, but once I learned that they work best over a glossy surface, I was sold. They seem to be hard to find, though. Your rod through the belly of the plane reminded me of the things you have to think about when you build a plane with the gear up. Looks great.

Superlative weathering as always, my friend @scalerambush!