[1/72] Hobby Boss Grumman F8F-1 Bearcat

The Grumman Bearcat was the successor to the F6F Hellcat, but arrived too late to see action in World War II.  It was smaller than the Hellcat, but had a large engine and a large 4-blade propeller that gave it excellent performance.  

This is the Hobby Boss “Easy Assembly” kit, one of the few 1/72 Bearcat kits I could find.  You can read more about the kit here.  It IS a very simple kit.  The engine and cowling are one piece, the cockpit is built-in and not assembled separately, the tail wheel is part of the fuselage mold, the bombs and rockets are one piece, etc.

Initial assembly went very quickly, painted the propeller and bombs.  Masked the canopy and painted the landing gear (once again, all one piece, no separate tires).  I used XF-4 Yellow Green (the canonical Zinc Chromate) for the wheel wells.  The US Navy started painting their aircraft a dark sea blue color, top and bottom.  Time to give this a shot.

Tamiya XF-17 Sea Blue is the color!  Here we have all the blue parts airbrushed.

I brush painted everything with Future in anticipation of decals.  The final aircraft is also going to be glossy.  However, the Future did not cover evenly and looked patchy.  I then airbrushed on X-22 Clear and that made everything nice and even.  I thinned it with a bit of X-20 thinner.

The canopy came out quite nice (this is blown up to a ridiculous scale). I used Micro Mask gel to do the middle part of the front (a notoriously difficult shape to cover) by putting a drop of the mask on that spot. You can see the perfectly shaped rubbery mask that came off. Time for decals! Decals were pretty good, though a couple of the larger star markings did rip as I was applying them.

 

 
Paints

Tamiya Acrylic

X-22 Clear

XF-1 Flat Black
XF-2 Flat White
XF-3 Flat Yellow
XF-4 Yellow Green
XF-16 Flat Aluminum
XF-17 Sea Blue 
XF-19 Sky Grey
XF-58 Olive Drab
XF-66 Light Grey