Agape forum member Drew Tarter (Navairfan) shared his work on this wonderful looking Korean War Corsair. Great stuff Drew!
Here’a another one of my older builds, Hasegawa’s 1/48 F4U-4 Corsair. Released in 1981 (over 32 years ago!) the Hasegawa -4 features good fit, excellent overall shape and outline, raised panel lines for those who care (I do not), and very basic cockpit detail. The main gear doors have fine detail, but the gear wells are featureless and too shallow, but I left them as is. I did make the following improvement to address some of the kits’ other shortcomings:
I replaced the canopy with a vac-formed one from Falcon, and dressed up the cockpit with an Eduard photo-etched instrument panel and cockpit detail set. I cut away the wingtip lights and made new ones fro Micro Crystal-Clear, and used my wife’s hair to make a scale antenna wire. The kit comes with no under-wing pylons or ordnance, just a pair of drop tanks. I scratch-built the pylons and raided my spares box to come up with four HVAR’s, a 1,000-pound general purpose and two small anti-personnel bombs to hang under the wings. The load-out of five-inch rockets and bombs is typical for a ground attack mission during the Korean War. The biggest change I made was to cut out and drop the flaps.
I used kit decals to depict an F4U-4 from VF-192 ‘Ghostriders’, deployed aboard USS Princeton on a 1951 Korean War cruise.
