The Caracal Decals showed up this week, so I went back to getting the kit ready.
The FJ-3, as a kit and as an actual airplane, is a serious can of worms.
Since I had done the FJ-2 with flaps down and wings folded, I decided I would do this FJ-3 with flaps up and wings down. That was the first deficient decision. Like many kits with "deployed stuff" options, the kit prefers to be built with the options deployed. I had to trim out the interior of the wing rib detail in order to raise the flaps, and they don't really fit nice and smooth. I did the same fuselage assembly with this as i did with the FJ-2 - assembling each side, left and right, into one part, then proceeding to put in the interior. That worked as advertised. The wing/fuselage assembly went OK. Overall, I think it looks better in photos taken from 3 feet away like I did than it does eyeballing it from 18 inches.
There was a fun discovery that they got confused putting holes in the lower wing to mount the Sidewinder rails, with the one on the right not in a "mirror" position to the one on the left, but I caught that and got it set right, drilled out two holes in the right place.
But what is real fun is the coming paint job. You can find photos of every airplane that is on the two Caracals sheets, and I was studying a black and white shot of the one I wanted to do, and got puzzled by the fact the gear legs appeared black.Huh? WTF? So I contacted Tommy Thomason, the go-to authority for post WW2 navair, and discovered that most likely it is this "tar-like" paint that the Navy applied to some airplanes in the mid-50s in a misguided attempt to reduce corrosion. Some of the airplanes also had the interior of the gear doors and the wheel well painted in this stuff. Some of them had some things like the well pained and the doors not painted with it, etc., etc. Then there is the question of the cockpit color - what is described as a "duck egg blue-green" the FJ-2 and 3 cockpits were done, though at some point FJ-3s began coming off he line with Dark Gull Grey cockpits and earlier airplanes got repainted when they went through overhaul, but some grey cockpits still had green seats and vice versa, and while one airplane in a squadron might be one way, others would be different. There is no way outside of a color photo of the actual airplane to decide any of this.
Fortunately I found a small color photo to do the airplane I want, so I had to repaint the cockpit from DGG to this funny green (which I did with 5 parts Tamiya XF-21 Sky to one part Tamiya X-14 Sky Blue) And I will do the wheel wells in black but I am going to raise the main doors to avoid further questions.
I also had to make some plastic small wing fences after the p-e fences popped off. I got good enough at doing two that I thought I would replace them all, but sanity prevailed.
My overall advice: build it with the wings folded and drop the flaps - which makes it really obviously not "just another Sabre" when you line it up with your F-86s.
7 attached images. Click to enlarge.
