From The Pit to the Paint
Having all the internals installed, I could close up the fuse, install the wings, and get ready to fill and sand any seams.
Fit is typical Tamiya so the only seam work that is necessary is minor, isolated to the fuse and wing halve joints. I used a little Tamiya Super Fine Putty to fill in any spots that needed to be built up and then sanded everything down with progressive grades of paper; starting with 400 and then working my way all the way up to 3600 grit. After checking to make sure everything was nice and smooth and rescribing a few minor areas along the fuse seam that had been lost during the filling and sanding process, it was time to start applying some color.
I found getting good color references a bit challenging for these Salvadoran birds. There were a few color shots on the web and these proved helpful. Probably the most help came from the references included in the Aztec Models decal sheet. The decal sheet contains markings for a number of Salvadoran and Honduran Soccer War Corsairs. These are both F4U-1D’s as well as F4U-5’s. The decals are nicely printed but what I really liked were the color side and top views as well as the reference text for each aircraft. You’ll find when reading through the text that there’s nothing too definitive out there as to the colors and markings of these particular planes when delivered so the underlying “base coat” is left to the modeler’s discretion. The Salvadoran aircraft were overpainted with a 5 tone camouflage prior to the 100 Hours War with some colorful yellow banding and insignias being added after the conflict. I felt like the straight up camouflage, although very colorful, would be a bit too plain so I went with the post conflict scheme. When looking at all the references, the Corsairs look pretty well used with lots of chipped paint so I was going to have to lay down an initial coat of aluminum in those areas that would receive the chipping effects.
Since the aluminum undercoat was only there to show some chipped effects, I skipped the use of Alclad and the need for a gloss black undercoat and when straight for the Floquil Old Silver.
I gave a light coat to all the areas where chipped paint was likely to be seen based on the few references pictures I was able to find. Once complete, I set the airframe aside for a bit to allow the enamel coat to cure before switch over to Tamiya acrylics for the camouflage. The Aztec sheet comes with FS color callouts along with a few recommendations for changing the shade of the basic FS color. For some colors, I went with these recommendations while others I used my own mix based on the reference photos. I’ll first list the colors I used and then walk through their basic application. Again, since I use Tamiya acrylics almost exclusively when airbrushing, I’ll provide the FS callout as well as the mix formula I used with the Tamiya paints.
- FS34227 Pale Green – mix created per a recommendation I found online consisting of 1 part XF-71, 1 part XF-21, and 2 parts XF-2
- FS34092 Medium Green – mix created per a recommendation I found online consisting of 1 complete pot of XF-67 to which I added 45 drops of XF-3
- FS33613 Radome Tan – mix created with 1 part XF-55, 1 part XF-3, and 2 parts XF-2. This creates a more yellowish hue than what I think Radome Tan should be. That being said, I liked it and was going to tone it down any way with a light green filter to be applied later. Just a note here on the FS33613. The Aztec sheet actually calls out FS30117 Military Brown with an adder of 15% white for the particular aircraft I am modeling but again, I wanted a more yellow hue so I went with the callout for another aircraft on the Aztec Sheet.
- FS34079 Dark Green – used straight up XF-61
- FS36495 Light Grey – used a mix of 8 parts XF-19 and 1 part of XF-2
- Aluminum – used straight up Tamiya XF-16 for the rudder
If you look closely at some of the reference pictures, you’ll notice that some places on the underside actually appear to show the overwrapped camo coming through. I wanted to show a little bit of this on the final model just to add some extra dimension so I started by painting the entire model Pale Green. I then started adding the different colors to create the unique patterns. Along the way, I masked off the wing walk on the port wing just to get a feel for the finished look and sprayed that with Flat Black. When I removed the tape, some of the acrylic paint was removed so this not only allowed me to get the wing walk in place but it also started to show the chipped effect I was after. I did the same thing for the yellow wing bands.
I continued with this approach until all the topside and bottom side camo was in place. I was a bit sporadic on the underside camo, keeping it to a minimum and isolated to just the wing outer surfaces. Once the topside was down, I then sprayed the underside with Light Grey, going extra light with the coat at the wing tips to allow some of the base camo to come through.
