Convair XF2Y-1 (YF-7A) Sea Dart

Robert Podkoński
Perfect work! Congrats, Dave! (I know this kit well and even assembled it, though I was not brave enough to replicate this painting scheme...)

István Szücs
As I see, the assembly instruction is not so complicated... Perfect replica of a rarely seen plane! Congrats!

Robert Podkoński
This is Mach 2 kit, though, Istvan...soap-like polistyrene that refuses any cooperation - glueing included... Believe me, I have a few Mach 2 kits under my belts...

Ben Marshall
Such an awesome aircraft, and a great job with whats sounds like a tricky kit! Two thumbs up!

István Szücs
Robert, I believe you, I just wanted to say the assembly draw is not so informative.

Ben M
I've been thinking of building this one soon; inspirational!

Robert Podkoński
@ Istvan - it was just a word of warning before you would think about starting a Mach 2 kit 😉 Instruction sheets are always like this one - hand drawn and xerox copied...

Dave Burgess
I agree with ALL of the above comments: The styrene is very soft and 'soapy'; the instructions are usually just an exploded view of the parts, decals are minimal; however, Mach 2 is prepared to produce kits of rare aircraft, so I'm not going to disabuse them! I have built several of their kits, and I still have some to build,. Robert - re: the livery I chose, I procrastinated for almost a year on whether I would tackle this paint scheme. I desperately wanted to do it, but the idea of masking all those stripes, combined with the fact that the 'soapy' properties of the plastic meant that the paint didn't adhere well. My first attempt at masking the yellow on the wings resulted in some of the paint lifting. In the end, I decided to use Microscale stripes. There are over 100 pieces of stripes making up that pattern, many of them in the pattern on the fuselage! In the end though, I'm glad I did it, and I think it turned out very well. It's one of my favourite paint schemes of all the aircraft I've done so far!

Robert Podkoński
After reading your explanations, Dave, I am even more impressed... Chapeau bas! And I do agree with you - SeaDart in this scheme looks absolutely awesome.

Alex K
Impressive work! 👍 👍

Dave Burgess
One of the trickiest bits of striping was, ironically, the vertical stabilizer. The yellow stripes are constant width, but the blue 'stripes' between them taper from the rear of the rudder to the front, due to the fact that the strips gradually angle upward as you move up the rudder. The problem was getting the yellow stripes positioned such that each of the tapered blue 'stripes' were uniformly wide AND tapered. Even a 1/10 of a millimetre out and it would stand out like a sore thumb! I spent a couple of hours on each side with a wet paintbrush and x-acto knife, gently nudging each yellow stripe in place, before I was satisfied with the result.

Robert Podkoński
And you have done it perfectly, Dave. Chapeau bas!

Guy Rump
Very impressive 👍