Italeri 1/72 F4U-4B Corsair

ITALERI 1:72 F4U-4B CORSAIR

Reviewer: Darrell Thompson (rec.models.scale)
Kit Review submitted: 10 February 2002

Kit Number: 062
Reviewer: Darrell Thompson
Kit Review Submitted: Feb 2002

Aircraft

The Corsair famous for its inverted gull wing was built around the powerful Pratt and Whitney R-2800 engine, on which they hung a huge propeller. The size of this prop was what lead to the gull wing design, the front of the aircraft had to be high enough for ground clearance of the prop but the undercarriage needed to be short so it was enough to withstand carrier landings.

The F4U-4 was fitted with the more powerful R-2800-42W engine which meant a four bladed propeller had to be used for the first time on the Corsair to absorb all that power. Also the cockpit was given a floor unlike the early Corsairs. The F4U-4 was fitted with six .50 calibre machine guns and the F4U-4B was different in having these replaced with four 20-mm cannons.

The Kit

Two sprues contain the 46 parts moulded in dark blue plastic and one clear contains the two-piece canopy. I know moulding the kit in the same colour as the finished model makes final painting easier but I hate working with dark plastic as it makes its harder to see all the detail and painting parts like the cockpit difficult. The surface finish has a small amount of the Italeri ‘cast iron’ rough finish, which will require a light sanding to remove. The panel lines are recessed and are slightly heavy in places, such as the wing fold line, but it is not enough to spoil the look of the model. The canopy is moulded in two pieces, but is a little thick giving a slightly distorted view through it. Armament consist of ten 5 inch rockets and two 250 lb bombs and an external fuel tank is also provided.

Instructions

The instructions are clear and well laid out, with paints being given in Model Master numbers. The painting/decal guide is given in the form of four view drawings and two colour side views drawings are supplied on the back of the box.

Construction

Construction begins with the cockpit which comprises of a floor with side consoles, seat, instrument and a control column. The console and instrument panel have raised detail which looks quite good once painted and dry brushed. I replaced the seat with a scratchbuilt item because it is a ‘one piece’ seat in the kit, the seat in the U-4 was a bucket style base with what looked like a separate armoured plate used as the back rest. Then all is needed is some seat belts to finish off the cockpit.

Next the engine is mounted onto its bulkhead, only one row of cylinders is supplied but once the model is finished it’s hard to see anyway. Before fitting the fuselage together you need to open up the forward hole on the top and bottom of the aft fuselage. There is another hole on the top of the fuselage, which the instructions don’t indicate to open but later in step 6 tells you to insert an aerial in this hole! As far as I can tell from my references this is a radar altimeter aerial, the same as the one you insert in the underside hole, and probably wouldn’t work very well onto the aircraft! So don’t open the aft hole on the top but once the fuselage has been glued together drill a hole in the underside, level with the trailing edge of the wing for the second aerial.

Before gluing the fuselage together I removed the pilots headrest and the gun sight with a knife, these are both split down the middle with the fuselage halves and it would be easier to replace them after the fuselage is together, the gun sight isn’t accurate anyway it’s square and should be round. The fuselage fits together with no real problem and only a small amount of filler was required.

The wing is made up of one complete bottom section to which the two top halves are attached after drilling out the required hole for the armament you wish to attach (see the comments on the rockets below) and fitting the reasonable detailed intercooler/oil cooler intakes. The wing join is all around the edge of the wing which leaves a thick trailing edge, which is best thinned down using a knife to scrape away the excess plastic once the wings are assembled. The wing to fuselage join is less than perfect; I needed to use filler along both the wing roots. Also I was left with a large gap at the front, between the bottom of the wing and the engine cowling. I fixed this by inserting a piece of plasticard vertically and once glue into position sanding down to size.

The wing cannons are separate and fit into hole in the leading edge of the wing. The shape of these isn’t that great so I made my own from plastic rod.

Figure 6 indicates attaching a boarding ladder to the right-hand side of the fuselage, this is incorrect as the ladder was first fitted on the F4U-5. Instead there should be a cut out step in the right-hand inboard flap, but I decided it wasn’t worth the hassle, the cut out being very small in this scale.

The main undercarriage legs are made up of three parts, the main leg and a supporting strut either side. If you attach them together as indicated in the instructions the struts tapers in towards the top of the leg, whereas they should have a significant flare out at the top of the leg. I over came this by installing the strut round the wrong way, which made them look more realistic. The main wheels are made up of two halves and the wheel itself has nice detail. The undercarriage doors also have very nice detail on the insides.

The bombs provided look convincing for this scale and the rockets aren’t too bad, but the tail ends of the rockets requires some cleaning up. The ten rockets are each attached on one ‘long’ pylon, unfortunately the U-4B only had eight rocket pylons and these were ‘stub’ (very short) pylons (and yes the artist got the picture wrong on the front of the box). They were also in a staggered arrangement, the inboard pylon was slightly further back than the two outboard pylons and the other pylon was actually mounted on the bottom of outboard cannon housing at the leading edge of the wing. The pylons were like this because of the cannons mounted in the wing did not allow for the usual type to be used. I chose not display the rockets, but if you wanted to it wouldn’t take much work to produce some correct ‘stub’ pylons and mount them in the correct positions.

Decals

Decals for three aircraft are provided, all from the Korean War. One naval aircraft from VF-53 and two marines aircraft from VMA-332 and VMA-323, the later being the scheme I chose to do. Of course all these aircraft are overall dark blue.

The decals have a semi-gloss appearance and are perfectly on register. The number 3 decals, the national insignia’s for the fuselage sides, are noticeably smaller than the ones supplied for the wings. My references showed that they should be as big as the ones on the wings, so I used the correct size of insignia from Experts-Choice’s excellent US insignia set.

When placing the decals on to the model surface they seem to ‘stick’ well and were hard to move. I had to use a lot more water than usual to get them to slide. But once in place they seemed to have no adverse reaction to Micro Set setting solution. The decals silvered very slightly in a couple of areas, but I think that was down to user error.

Accuracy

The overall dimensions match those stated in the instructions, 10.16 m long and a span of 12.50 m, which also matched the drawings in the Detail & Scale book on the later Corsairs. Other than those version errors mentioned above the kit seems fairly accurate to me.

Conclusion

Highly recommended if you want a late version Corsair. With the a few changes made I now have a nice looking Corsair. I don’t think I’ll be purchasing another late series from Italeri in the near future, I’m slightly put off by the dark colour of the plastic, now if they moulded them in a lighter colour that would be a different matter. Anyway I need to add some earlier Corsairs to my collection first.

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Academy 1/72 F4U-1D Corsair
Italeri 1/72 F4U-5N Corsair (Mark B) : (John Lacey)

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