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Well here we go again, this time I'm indulging in a Tamiya kit. Much as I like the challenge of upgrading the delights of Revell's offerings, sometimes you just want something a little less demanding. Such as the Tamiya F-16C which judging by all the accounts I've read, is a superb kit. Squirrelled away in my stash is the Thunderbirds offering which allows an earlier Blk32 aircraft which differs from the mainstream Blk50 kit by having the P&W engine, normal (small) shock inlet, lightweight gear with the original wheels and flat MLG doors. However, as it is the Thunderbirds kit it also does not come with weapons and some of the pylon details which I will need for my chosen subject. I've always liked aggressor schemes (who doesn't!), in fact anything that gets away from monotone (grey) colour schemes and there is no doubting that the 64AGRS based out of Nellis has some of the most interesting schemes around. I'm pretty much a fan of all the schemes but for this one I've plumbed for the 'Flogger' scheme as pictured on the lead aircraft below. Crucially, the Thunderbirds kit comes with early sidewinder rails which is right for the era I'm looking at i.e. pre-AMRAAM. (USAF) Now I don't want to make it too easy so this will be an in-flight display and I will be adding lights to this one as well but most of the kit will be out of the box. Except for the engine exhaust which comes courtesy of ResKit (love their stuff). Oh and some ResKit winders, will probably need an ALQ-188 and ACMI pod as well. Maybe some cockpit enhancements from Quinta and might treat myself to some goodies from Kopecky who does loads of goodies for the F-16. Yeah, pretty much out of the box. Right, so where do we start. With the intake of course. That's the thing with adding lights, you can't build it in the order Tamiya would like you to. Because you need to add things like wires and batteries you also need to plan the layout of how you will connect it altogether noting that once you close a section up, that's it - no more access. The F-16 has some nav lights on each side of the intake. These can be added by drilling out a small hole and adding a very small LED. To avoid light overspill (a real problem with bright LEDs) a silver foil backing is used. The outside will be first painted black to kill light overspill. Luckily the actual intake has a small enough gap for the wires to go past and feed back into the fuselage. Another tight spot for lighting is the tail where the F-16 has a large anti-col beacon at the top and a smaller light at the base. Again, a small white LED was used with silver foil to limit overspill. The clear part sits on top of the LED and the wires run down the back of the rudder. I had to do this as this was a second hand kit and the tail had already been glued together. In addition, the started kit had also had the base of the fin cut off in anticipation of reworking to an F-16A by the previous owner. I therefore needed to reinstate the original base using a thick piece of card as a strut to provide some strength. In addition to the wire, a thin fibre optic wire was run from the LED light down the base of the rudder and out of the base of the tail. Interestingly, I'm pretty sure Tamiya had plans to add their own lighting kit to this model. The wing tip photo below shows a groove carved into the inside of the wing which leads to the point where the wing nav lights are and the design of that clear part is definitely with lighting in mind. I know because I was going to do the same to fit the lighting I had in mind. Thank you Tamiya for making that part of the kit construction slightly easier! Well its a start. I should point out that progress is inversely proportional to the many demands of family and life in general so please be patient. We will get there in the end.

I recently finished a long build of Su-25 (long as in the meantime model landed in the box couple of times) and was wondering what next. I took me couple of days to decide and take out model which I got very long time ago. It was my second purchase of 1:32 birds, I gave around 50 bucks for it, so it was rather a bargain. So here it is my F-16C/CJ Block 50 from Tamiya. Apart from model itself, I'm planning to use: - Aires Cockpit Set - Aires Wheel Bay - Aires Exhaust nozzles - Wheelliant Wheels - M61 gun from Master - CMK intake (not sure about this one) - Eduard Canopy Masks - Master Piot and AoA - Master Static Discharges - ResKit BRU-57 (probably) Additionally I have some - Wolfpack's JDAMs - Wolfpack's JSOWs - Eduard's B and C AMRAAMs - Eduard's Sidewinders I would like to do an Aggressor scheme but they rarely are full loaded, so I have problem here - will se later. Due to COVID-19 I'm still waiting for some of above, so it will be long build. As of now, I've started with fuel tanks, HARMs and pylons: . . And as I will have aftermarket exhaust I will put engine on service cart. . Glued engine: . Now I will add some wiring to engine.

We take a look at an excellent new sheet from Fantasy Printshop covering four colourful F-16 Block 30 schemes from the 176th Fighter Squadron, Wisconsin Air National Guard: https://www.largescaleplanes.com/reviews/review.php?rid=2316 Iain

Welcome Everyone, thanks for flying by this build! Tamiya's 1/32 F-16C, this one's been done for over a month now but I didn't have the presentation and the stand the way I wanted it. I think it's ready for display now though(although as soon as I looked at closeups around the cockpit I see I have some touch-up to do LOL). I wanted to represent a picture I found on AirWingSpotter with the plane going vertical and vapor contrails billowing off the wing roots so for that I used medical rayon rope(basically just cotton balls in a rope form). I cut the arm from the Tamiya kit in half and turned it around to go vertical. I chose to do Lt. Col. Mike Chandler's bird from the 2004 show season. I was lucky enough to find a walk-around of his #1 and so i tried to represent it as best I could. This is an out of the box build except for 2 extras that I thought were crucial; the American Flag and the stopwatch in the cockpit. I preshaded with grey and dark grey panel line accent so that the lines would be crisp, without an surrounding shadow, to represent a show bird. I used MCW paints for all the gloss work and Vallejo for the cockpit and the exhaust nozzle. All of the striping is done via airbrush and the rest is with the kit decals. One of the unique things I did for this was to paint the engine internals to represent full afterburner. The way I have the plane oriented I guess I'll need some mirrors to see that now haha! I've included a picture below taken on a horizontal stand so you can see how it turned out. Let me know what you think as I may try this again and would like some feedback on it. You can check out my WIP for more details http://forum.largescaleplanes.com/index.php?showtopic=72439&hl=thunderbird

So I'm planning to add some emphasis to the panel lines on this build rather than leaving everything stark white. There are some shadows at the panel lines on the real thing but I don't think they are as bold as when a full preshading is done and I think black basing would be way too heavy; just my opinion and I'm not experienced with doing this so I'd like to get yours I used Tamiya's panle line accents to do this - dark grey and black. Take a peak and if you wouldn't mind submit an answer to the poll (hopefully this works as it's also my 1st poll). Accented parts 1st Coat of Insignia White 2nd Coat of Insignia White