Alex

Not sure. Ideally I’d like to paint as many of the markings as possible, so that would suggest something simpler than that rooster roundel on the side. But we’ll see.

This is a placeholder for now - I've got other things to finish first, but since the GB runs through December I should have plenty of time. I've had this kit of an attractive silvery French aeroplane in the stash for a while, so it's time it got built.

100% agree with this. Trying to form those sections out of putty sounds like a recipe for frustration.

Great job! I’m sure the recipient will be thrilled with it.

Beautiful! I just bought a copy of this kit, along with decals to do it up in Quantas livery.

I haven't lost the plot on this one; just been real busy with travel for work. I did manage to build the ejection seats. For the Tamiya Viper I'm using the kit parts, augmented with belts from the Kelik cockpit set. For the Kinetic kit, I've used an Eduard resin seat. I probably could have just as easily gone with the Kinetic parts, but the Eduard seat came in a bundle with their resin wheels, which I definitely wanted to use. In the below photos the Eduard seat is on the right, Tamiya on the left. These have not yet been flat-coated, so pardon any distracting shininess... The Eduard part definitely has more and more finely cast detail, but the biggest difference between the two is on the back, which of course won't be visible... The Eduard kit provided two or three copies of all of the decals for their ejection seat, so by being careful not to screw any of them up I was able to use them to do both seats, which definitely adds to the look of the Tamiya kit parts. Maybe when I get back from this next trip I can finally get after the Kinetic landing gear...

Wow - those wheels are an impressive bit of scratchbuilding indeed. Congrats on a great-looking model!

Fantastic - that silver base coat really pulls it all together!

Looking at the white-on-white assembly of LG parts and bay, I decided that it would just never look good without some kind of wash to emphasize the detail. This despite the fact that the LG bays you see in photos of in-service Vipers tend to be pretty spotless, and certainly devoid of the kind of accumulated "grime in the corners" implied by a pinwash. That said, sometimes we need to do some things that are a bit unrealistic to elicit that "look" of realism in our models. So I proceeded to gloss coat everything and hit it with dark gray Vallejo acrylic wash. These are two shots of one side of the main LG dry fit. Not yet flat coated either. The photos look grayer/dirtier than the pieces do in actuality. The level of detail is not terrible here even in the less-detailed Tamiya kit, and in a non-magnified view it actually looks pretty nice. I will obviously wait to assemble all this for good until the fuselage paint is completed; at that point I'll glue it up, touch up any missing paint on the hoses and electrical lines, then flat-coat it. I've also assembled and cleaned up the pylons and external fuel tanks for the Tamiya kit. I'll be using all ResKit AM weapons, and I have not touched those yet. I'm also most of the way through building and painting both the Tamiya ejection seat and the Eduard AM seat I'll be using for the Kinetic Viper. Pics of those once they are complete. Next I think I will shift back to the Kinetic kit and do the whole LG thing over on that one.

That sounds like the right way to do it.

These are all of the piece parts needed for the Tamiya LG, plus the very nice ResKit wheels/tires, cleaned up, detailed, and ready to paint. There are so many that I'm running out of clips, even having made more. So I think I'll go ahead and get these painted before starting on the Kinetic LG. Adding hydraulic/electrical lines to these things again emphasizes what a relatively tiny aircraft the F-16 is, at least compared to the Soviet jets I built last year. Working on these LG is like doing a 1:72 Flanker.

+1 for sure. One of the most convincing wooden props I’ve seen at this scale.

Beautiful work!

Those look great!

The Tamiya viper has lots of little pieces of the fuselage molded separately, obviously to minimize the parts changes needed to represent different variant of the airplane. But, none of these fit with the kind of precision that you see in, for example, their 1:32 warbirds. So lots of little bits of filler around the nose. Thankfully all slim enough gaps that Vallejo plastic putty is fine - no need to break out the CA. The radome also doesn't quite sit flush on the front of the fuselage - enough so that I wouldn't wait and install it after painting. So I'm putting it on now. I looked around the interwebs and got pretty consistent signal that no nose weight is needed on this kit, so I took a gamble and didn't add any (the front LG are not beefy). Note that I used turned brass pitots from Master. This is what it looks like with pretty much all of the (fairly extensive) surface fixing done. I'm going to bring the Kinetic kit to this same point and then shift to working on the landing gear.

Working through the fuselage assembly process on the Kinetic kit, there's also a challenge to be found in getting the upper fuselage pieces to align cleanly, but perhaps less so that with the Tamiya design. Both kits demand careful attention and a multi-step gluing process to get these pieces aligned, and I probably did not do either one of them as well as I could have. I would devote more time and plan on re-shaping the insides of the pieces to improve fit if I was to build another one of these. In Kinetic's favor, there are certainly fewer, small gaps that need filling, for example in the join of the forward intake section, it's just these short gaps on the sides: Unlike the Tamiya kit, a couple very minor trims led the rear fuselage cone to fit perfectly flush. Kinetic molds these static wicks into the wings. Let's see how many I manage to break off... This little pitot probe was poorly molded, so I replaced it with aluminum tubing. In contrast, the equivalent part by Tamiya was nice enough to use as-is. One area where Kinetic clearly underperformed was the vertical stabilizer. This piece at the top (and the thing is obviously modular to support multiple variants in one kit) did not fit well and had no means of positive location. Required some filler. Overall, though, the design and fit of the main fuselage pieces was better in the Kinetic kit. Not terrible by any means for Tamiya, but Kinetic does better.

Yes - I write the product number on top of the cap of every bottle of MRP (which are nice and white so easy to write on).

Once. I had a half-finished 1:350 aircraft carrier that I wasn't terribly happy with, and I was moving house, and in the bin it went. I think I've finished every other kit I've started (although many of the early finished ones got binned during the move as just being below the level of the work I can now do, so why keep them).

Geez. That's terrible. At least our postal system just overcharges us and then loses our mail....

Plenty of imperfect fits to deal with as I plow through assembling the basic airframe on the Tamiya kit. Panels that insert underneath the wings: Join of the intake section to the main fuselage: An annoying sink mark to fill: Nevertheless, I've muddled through and gotten to a reasonable stopping point, with the basic airframe assembled, gaps filled, and cleaned up. For now the vertical stabilizer and flaperons are just dry fit. One thing that is very striking looking at this is how small an aircraft the F-16 is. It looks positively petite next to the F-4 and Su-27 on the shelf above my workbench. So now I'm going to set the Tamiya kit aside and bring the Kinetic Viper up to the same state. I'm hoping that this might involve a bit less seam filling. Maybe?

For sure, and I often will paint tails, stabilators, etc off the model and then glue them last thing.

Here's another "very Tamiya" thing. For some reason, the vertical stabilizer is designed to be removable. Why? Hard to say. Maybe to facilitate storing the finished model? More of the polycaps that are so near and dear to Tamiya kit designers. I'll build it the way they want, because if nothing else it should provide nice positive, accurate location of the part, but I'm pretty sure that I will just glue the thing in place.

Before assembling the intakes, I masked the forward part of each intake trunk - much easier to do now than after assembly! The Tamiya intake lip was not quite a difficult as I'd feared - here it is cleaned up and faired in. And the equivalent shot for the Kinetic kit I then went on to complete several general "complete assembly of the fuselage" steps, starting with the Tamiya Viper. The upper forward fuselage piece did not fit perfectly, and required clamping while the glue set to get it aligned. And even still there's a detectable step where the pieces meet right by the wing root. It's not quite as bad as it looks in the photo, which I deliberately angled so the light made it as obvious as possible. But it's still going to require that I go over the panel lines and rivets to deepen them, then sand it flush. In retrospect some more careful dry fitting and shaving down the inside of the piece would have paid off. Not exactly the best Tamiya ever. However, this is much worse, and not something that I did to myself... The rear face of the fuselage is not in plane - top and bottom halves are at a slight angle to each other, so the tail cone can only fit one or the other flush. Grrr. I glued it so it's flush on top and will fill the lower half with CA. The gap is too thin to fill with even the thinnest sheet plastic I have. But still a glaring miss for the kit. In contrast, the fit between top and bottom halves along the rear quarter is excellent. The pieces are internally mitered so they come together at a sharp edge, and it took only some extra-thin cement and a few seconds of light finger pressure to get a razor-crisp join. The Kinetic kit is designed to work the same way - I'm eager to test out whether it works as well as Tamiya's does.

Both kits attach the forward LG bay to the intake trunking. As with the rear bays, Kinetic molds in much more detail: Tamiya: Kinetic: The Tamiya kit is also going to require some careful assembly of the fuselage structure around the intake. Just dry fit, there's a gap between the two at the bottom, which if left that way will cause the edge of the inner trunk to protrude above the intake lip. That gap has to be eliminated in assembly. Even then, the Tamiya design has the intake lip simply gluing on flush as a butt joint on the front of this assembly. And its shape is not a perfect match. That's going to be a very challenging thing to get as close to right as possible, probably via sequential gluing of small areas with CA. It'll still take sanding to fair in. In contrast, the Kinetic design puts a small raised ridge around the back of the intake lip, so it is a positive fit inside the fuselage. This probably makes the full assembly a touch too thick for scale, but does a vastly better job of locating the part. I'm calling this specific sub-assembly a clear win for Kinetic.

And some finished exhaust images Next I think I will bite the bullet and deal with the forward intake trunking, where comprehensive seam eradication is going to be necessary.