The Little World

A phrase spoken by our club President – Rob – when giving me the Grumman F9F Panther model you see in the heading.

It is a product of the late John Evans – a prolific and skilled member of SMCWA for many years. He built any number of USN aircraft, as well as RAAF, RAF, and USAF types. His output in scale artillery is truly amazing – our club is seeking a military museum that would be able to accept and showcase the guns. They would be an asset to any institution.

We are trying to wrestle space back for current members to display their work – it is a large clubhouse but the demands of some of the bigger models press us in. They are all beautiful, but sometimes they can occupy a great deal of area.

I shall take home this Panther with gratitude – the workmanship on it is superb. There is much to learn from studying John’s methods and the finishes he was able to achieve. They beat mine, but maybe one day I can come close.

In any case, I do not number a USN Panther in the collection – and this one seems to have a unique colour scheme. The closest I can come to finding the colours and patterns are on aircraft used in Advanced Training Squadrons in Texas and Florida. Hobby Master made a 1/48 die-cast that looks very similar and there was one illustration in Britmodeller. Harold Skaarup has a B/W image on his web page that looks very like.

I suspect the kit from which this was built was the Hasegawa version. I shall look closely at the Hobby Boss one I used for the Argentinian Navy and see what differences I can find.

Still want a dark blue F9F for my Korean War shelf…