Forum member unimodeler (Chris) submitted these photos of his build of the classic Monogram F4B-4 kit, along with a wonderful, scratch-built carrier deck.
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I diverted to a little work on a 1960’s vintage issue Monogram 1:72 F4B-4. It’s amazing the quality of the kit. I threw some interior stuff together…nothing accurate since not much will be visible once it’s closed up.Iit’s all strip and sheet styrene except for the seat and stick..they came from the parts bin…possibly a Revel P-47d
Improvements consist of Starfighter decals, lower wing gap fix, scratchbuilt cockpit, scratchbuilt windscreen, drilled out lift points, wing handholds, scratchbuilt display stand, and rigging.
I’ve got a set of Starfighter decals for this kit. They’re nice…and for $5 can’t be beat. I think the red in the wing chevron/fuselage band is a little too orange. So I repainted the decal today. I also managed to finish the engine. The red is a Vallejo Model Color acrylic: Flat Red. I glossed it up with a coat of future.
Chris had this to say about his carrier deck:
I’ve been working on the display base. It’s a section of deck from Lexington circa early 1930’s. I am mounting it on top of a metal tin that I obtained when I bought a wallet at target.
It’s just some scribed wood that I ran across at the hobby shop the other day. The maker is Northeastern scale lumber co.Iit’s 3/32″ scribed which is .01″ off what 2×8 lumber would be in 1/72.
I used some evergreen plastic C channel glued face to face to make the eye pads. I carved an opening into the wood deck with an exacto knife, then glued the “box” into the opening and sanded it flush. Based on the angles I chose to offset the deck, I only needed to do 5 eye pads. There should be some cross bars inside the “box” to function as the tie points, but being as this is such a small scale they are nearly invisible in any case so I did not add them. (Plus I’m lazy). In any case, I stained the deck, hit it with some rattle can flat and then used cheap craft store acrylics for the yellow stripe on the deck. All in all, it’s pretty close to what the Lexington class deck looked like. The expansion strips are present, the individual eye pads, the colors.
Outstanding work for sure! Thanks for sharing that with us.
