1/48 Revell F4U-7

French Corsair

by José R. Alvarez

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Hey Folks!!!!  I’ve always wanted to have among my collection the legendary Corsair. I think I felt in love with this plane, since I used to watch the old series “The Black Ships”. Capt. Gregory “Papi” Boyington was a hero to me. I was just an 11 years old kid.

Unfortunately, here in my country doesn’t exist none specialized hobby store where one could find a wide-open line of scale model kits. All the kits you can have at your reach are always the same, they come always from only one or two manufacturers, so is very difficult to us to find the kit you ever dreamed of.

Finally last Christmas came to the toy store a very important amount of kits, among which was the Revell F4U-7 French Corsair. And the most important thing to me was that the kit’s scale was 1/48 and it came with all the detail enough to get a very good result. So here I am with my Star decorating my collection. But that’s not all. I bought two. So this time I present to you this version of the F4U-7 French Corsair which represents to the “57S Escadrille École de `l Aeronautique Navale in 1961, based in Kore a”.

I promise to present to you my future project that I’m working on with my second Revell F4U-7 Corsair. Maybe I should try to make it a huge conversion to a F4U-5N or a F4U-4.

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I Have to realize that Revell has improved very much their molds. I had to deal with just a few problems. No big deal with them. Practicing some scratch building to the fuselage to make the canopy fit in it (as the real Corsair does) didn’t take much time and work to me.  At the end of the day I had an exact copy of the real canopy. See the Photos as it follows. For references you can visit this web page: http://www.fanakit.chez-alice.fr/f4u-7

I also added some extra detail to the cockpit and to the canopy frame to make them look like the real ones. But the original detail in the cockpit from the box has a very good quality.

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The only error to me that Revell still has for some kits, was that the decals for the Rockets are to big for them. Actually I never found any information on the Internet about how the decals should go on the Rockets, so I decided to put them on using my imagination according to the instruction book. Don’t look bad. The Pitot tube was also made by two pieces of .035 and .020 Strip Styrene. The landing gear struts also have their own detail. I added some stretched sprue simulating the Hydraulic system lines and four more little stretched sprue for the springs in the landing gear actuators.

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And that’s it. I really enjoyed making my French Corsair. I hope you`ll enjoy reading this article and seeing these Photos. Actually I did my best, because my digital camera isn’t a professional one so I had to make a lot of tests first. If you want to send any comments or share information, pictures, etc, feel free writing to my e-mail: modelnetjr1002@yahoo.com.mx

José

Photos and text © by José Alvarez