Flaps and Aileron Woes
Afternoon all, been an unexpectedly busy week in this last bit of freedom before I head back to work so I haven't had much time at the bench, and to be honest I wasn't feeling like fighting the Corsair all that much.
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So let's jump in to some complaints on the kit, they aren't exactly the most difficult issues to deal with but they're just a bit more annoying than I'd like. Firstly the ailerons, they consist of two parts but the two parts don't fit well. I had to sand them quite a lot to get to fit on one pair, on the second pair I just went and sanded them quite far since no matter how careful you are you're gonna have to fill in a pointless and inaccurate seamline. It strikes me as very strange that MF went through the effort of making a very nice seamless fuselage design where I won't need to do any seamline fixing aide from behind the rudder, but then made these ailerons in a very poorly designed way. They could really be either one piece or just two pieces where the seam is on the trailing edge, not halfway in. The Corsair aileron has a bit of an indentation towards the underside inside leading edge, but it's not hugely noticeable on the real aircraft and MF have overdone this massively, so this had to be filled in otherwise it would look like a chunk had been taken out of the wing.
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1. Needs more work, but you can see the visible seam is still present.
Now the flaps, which are a shame. So on this kit the unfolded wing
has to have flaps down, the unfolded
has to have flaps up, now personally if the option of having a choice up or down really couldn't be done then I'd rather it was the other way round but regardless this has caused a few issues. Firstly on my -1A (which is the folded wing with flaps up, modifed to be unfolded) the flaps just don't look nice. They have 'The London Look' gap between the flaps, and they don't line up well. Even excluding the outer wing due to the that being modified, the two flaps on the inner wing have that unsightly and larger than I'd like gap, whilst the outer wing has a huge gap between the flap and the aileron.
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1. The gaps might not be major but they're certainly enough to annoy me! The gap between the flaps and the ailerons is a big complaint too. From the underside the flap gaps are not noticable, but that hardly helps.
Onto the birdcage, which is an unfolded wing modified to have flaps up. Modifying these flaps to be raised is more challenging than the same modification to the Tamiya kit, it required cutting away at part of the wing in order to get the inboard flaps closer to the fuselage or else there would be a big noticeable gap here. The flaps also, without modification, sit too low and needed sanding to fit better. Every flap needed to be sanded on each corner to fit, the middle flap needed quite a lot of sanding on the side at an angle to reduce the size of the visible gap, and the wing needed to be thinned to accommodate the new position. Is it difficult? No. Is it a headache which to be honest I wasn't in the mood to fix? Yes. Is it a shame that the 28 year old kit still, despite the wing issues it has, seems to me to be the far better Corsair to build in the wing area alone? Yes, granted I'm not doing the MF kit favours by going outside of the design decisions they've made.
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1. On the right side we see the flap modified to be raised, but a large gap from the fuselage is present if I don't cut away at the wing as seen on the left.
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1. Without modification to the wing and flap, the birdcage flaps will sit low like this when trying to make it raised
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1. Interestingly the Tamiya inboard flap fits better here than the MF does, but the rest of the flaps would need a lot of modification to work.
With all that said and done I also have to of course mention that pesky F4U-1 flap foot hole which is inaccurately in these kits, but thankfully since the option of having it as an engraved detail rather than a hole exists in the kit it makes filling it in and sanding it much easier than the Tamiya.
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1. Aileron gaps are very noticable on this, regardless of whether it's the wing meant to have flaps up or down.
Overall with that headache out of the way I can say I'm through probably the most tedious bit. Did it kill my mojo? Not exactly, but I'd be lying if I wanted to fix that rather than doing other things which is why the update took a week. I was tempted to crack open another kit but I don't want another kit on the bench!
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1. Heres the gaps, wider than I'd like. The flaps themselves also don't fit amazingly against how the trailing edge should be, certainly an issue that the modified Tamiya doesn't have. This is the wing meant to have raised flaps.
Oh and also those wingtips? Yeah not hugely happy with them either, I find that that the underside has a larger gap that you'd like if you want the wingtip to be in a correct position.
At least the tailplane went on nicely!
