While the F7F Tigercat arrived just too late to see action in World War II, it did provide the Marine Corps with a versatile and powerful fighter for post war use. Packing an impressive weapons load, including four 20mm cannon and four .50 caliber machine guns, and incorporating two Pratt & Whitney R280052's in a lean, light airframe, the Tigercat provided the Marines with a fast, agile and hard hitting machine to support its ground troops.

Although not often associated with aerial reconnaissance, the F7F was especially suited to the task, and some Tigercats were modified for this purpose from the outset (a few early versions were on Okinawa when WWII ended). The plane was tough, agile and could carry a large load of cameras, making it an ideal candidate for tactical reconnaissance; not the "unarmed and unafraid" approach of the high, fast flyers, but the downintheweeds, shootyourwaytoyourtarget approach that the USAAF's F6 Mustangs had pioneered in WWII.

While most Tigercats in Korea served with VMF(N)531, the task of operating most of the F7F3P recon birds fell to the Marine Headquarters Squadron, or HEDRON, of the First Marine Air Wing, which operated an odd mixture of types over the course of the war.

A typical mission for the Hedron recon pilots took them north to where the shooting was. Flying fast and low to avoid antiaircraft fire, the planes would pop up over the terrain to photograph specific targets and then bolt for cover. Tigercats regularly took shrapnel and small arms hits, and one F7F3P came home with parts of a tree wrapped around its wing leading edges and nose. One pilot, CAPT Kenneth Dykes, could testify that in these circumstances the rugged Tigercat was the right airplane for the job. On a mission north of Seoul, a 37mm antiaircraft shell hit his aircraft in the right wing outboard of the engine, blowing a hole in it the size of a basketball. The plane shuddered, but after the initial shock Dykes realized the plane was still flying normally and he successfully reached base with his load of precious photos intact.

Monogram's old reliable F7F kit captures the rakish lines of the Tigercat, but the addition of detail to the spots where the kit falls down helps it look like a real fighter. Seeing as though this model is as old as I am ("born" in the summer of 1967, just like me!) it's held up well over the intervening 30 years. Luckily, Aries, a Czech modeling company, has released a cockpit set, a resin R280052, and a deluxe set containing two engines, the cockpit and parts for the wheel wells, as well as hardware for detailing the landing gear and mounting both engines completely exposed. Before I started work on any resin, I sanded the raised detail down and patiently rescribed the model, which is a bit of a task considering the latticelike approach Grumman took to the tail section. I also cut open the faces of the oil cooler exhaust vents, leaving a rectangular hole to simulate the open exhaust. Next, I added some detail to those intakes in the form of fine brass screen.

As a final preparatory step, I used a heavy duty grinding bit in a Dremel tool to bore out the engine faces in each cowling to accept Aries' R280052s, which are miniature kits in themselves.

At this point I painted the resin and brass cockpit parts. There were some fit problems with the cockpit tub and sidewall, but nothing too drastic. I glued several ounces of fishing weights in the nose to serve as a balance for the heavy tail. This is an important step in a tailheavy tricycle type like the F7F!

The conversion from a straight 3 to a 3P is simple. I had to scribe five ports for cameras on the sides and belly of the airplane and add a few whip antennas to the spine. F7F3Ps in the Korean Hedron were fitted with direction finding "footballs" on the spine. I scavenged one from an Airfix J2F Duck and made a mount from styrene strip.

When the entire airframe was assembled, I polished the model vigorously with Blue Magic. This gets the surface ready for paint and can also show up sanding flaws without requiring an extra layer of paint.

I masked off all the openings and shot the model with Testors buffing aluminum metallizer to provide a good check of the seams, and to prepare for realistic chipping of the final paint coat.

I painted the plane with a mixture of Floquil flat black and tire black to give a "scale effect". After the "black" paint had been applied and had dried for a few hours, I began to take it off on purpose! With the point of an XActo knife, I began chipping the paint at the leading edges and around panel lines. Another part of the weathering was the pale, sooty exhaust stains behind the engines. I very carefully sprayed a pattern of thin, light gray paint like a candle flame from the exhaust stacks back over the wing. I mixed black and brown paint to obtain a burnt metal color. Again, this was thinned, and this time I sprayed it only in a quarterinch area behind the stacks. This looked too dark, too burned, and nowhere near subtle enough. So, I mixed up more of the original gray color and sprayed a bit of it at the center of the brown pattern, then let off the pressure and lightly dusted the entire brown area

Now I applied the decals a simple set of white and red stars and bars in four places, stolen from a sheet for F4U5N nightfighters, and the large "AZ" tailcodes from a SuperScale sheet for 1:48 RAF bombers. The number "3" on the nose was another SuperScale decal, cribbed from a sheet meant for Avengers.

The final touch on the decals was a small Marine Corps emblem from Superscale's decals for prewar U.S. Navy and Marine Corps units.

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