ASW TBF

by Patrick Chung

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This is Accurate Miniatures' 1/48 TBF-1C. It is possibly one of the most beautiful plastic aircraft kits ever produced in modeling history.

And among these great kits I especially like the two-tone colour scheme of the ASW TBF-1C of the Atlantic Theatre.

However my example of this extraordinary kit was released under the Hasegawa label and the instruction sheet is the Japanese version. The drawing could be only described as "awful" - far worse than the original English version found in the AM boxes, and some area of the building sequence are quite orthodox.

The construction was straightforward but I found installing the ball turret was somewhat tricky.

Eduard's PE set 48-187 was used to enhance the interior and I found it one of the best set designed by Eduard. They also has 48-189 for flaps, but I did not bother to cut the flaps open.

The single decal option by Invisaclear in my example suffered heavy cracking and silvering. The adhesive on the backing paper seemed too weak. A coat of Microscale's "super film" solved the first problem but the second one forced me to try my hand on the most risky method I know. After all the major decals (insignia, numbers,etc.) were done, the stenciling was positioned carefully and when they were half dry, with extreme care, I sprayed few coats of strong solvant (Tenax 7) to get these tiny decals melted into the paints.

And it worked!

Other additional work included replacing kit part for the ignition harness and fuel lines with various copper wire and aluminium foils as tiny clips between them.

Antenna wire was made from 0.1mm monofilament thread and fixed in position by super glue.

Click the thumbnails below to view larger images:

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Review and Images Copyright © 2002 by Patrick Chung
Page Created 19 July, 2002
Last updated 04 June, 2007

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