1/32 Kitty Hawk F-5E Kicked Up A Notch. Oct 3/19. Finished!

[F`s are my favs]

Beautiful!

[Daniel460]

Beautiful detail work! 

 

Very educational build thread! Thanks for the detailed explanations...

 

 

 Dan

 

  

 

 

[Marcel111]

Pristine work on the pit! Neat find with that PC wiring, I'm gonna need to get me some of that also.

 

Cheers,

 

Marcel

[Wolf Buddee]

BACK Chuck!

 

Good to see you back at 'er here and doin' the F-5E complete justice.

Was the Black Box cockpit a recent acquisition or something you had collecting in your stash? I thought BB was gone the way of the Dodo?

 

Cheers,

Wolf  

[chuck540z3]

Thanks a lot guys.

 

21 hours ago, Wolf Buddee said:

BACK Chuck!

 

Good to see you back at 'er here and doin' the F-5E complete justice.

Was the Black Box cockpit a recent acquisition or something you had collecting in your stash? I thought BB was gone the way of the Dodo?

 

Cheers,

Wolf  

 

The BB 'pit was a gift from Scott Wilson, who helped me extensively with my F-4E build.  Scott used to work on F-4E's in the 80's and he had a lot of knowledge and one of a kind photographs of Phantoms that he shared in my build thread, which is why my model is so weathered (see below).  When Scott moved from the US Mid-West to the Big Island of Hawaii a few years ago, he mailed me a 1/32 Hasegawa F-5E kit and this BB cockpit as he cleaned out his stash.  I recently contacted Scott since I was about to start his model (with a big switch to the Kitty Hawk kit instead) and it turns out that when my wife and I will be on the Big Island in about 6 weeks on a cruise, Scott and his wife will be taking us on a full tour of the island when we get there.  Now that is what I call modeling collaboration!

 

Anyway, you are right, the Black Box (Avionix) line of resin aftermarket kits is long gone, so I am very lucky, as it turns out, to have this kit in hand.  I bet it would sell for over $100 on ebay if it was listed and from what I can tell of the kit, it's well worth it for the fine detail and ability to be used in the Kitty Hawk kit without too much fuss.

 

Pic 1

 

Pic 2

 

Pic 3

 

 

Glad to be back,

Chuck

 

Edited January 23, 2019 by chuck540z3

[Gazzas]

Great stuff, Chuck!

 

Gaz

[jimbo59]

every one of your updates sends me to the bench to work on something. Very inspiring 

[daz greenwood]

Excellent work as always Chuck! 

[chuck540z3]

Thank you guys!

 

 

January 24/19

 

As I mentioned above, I wasn’t happy with the cockpit sills, because there was a gap between the kit PE brass and the plastic, which looked crude.  After filling with thinned Tamiya putty, sanding and repainting, everything looks much better now as one unit, rather than glued together parts.  I also painted a little silver detail within the canopy hook slots, which are provided by the Black Box sidewalls.

 

 

 

While this stuff dries properly, I turned my attention to the area just in front of the cockpit, which houses the guns and front landing gear.  Decision time:

 

 

1) The front gun doors will be closed.  Although this kit is made specifically to have the doors open with the guns displayed, I don’t want the clean lines of this needle-like jet disrupted.  I will need to deal with poorly fitting doors and raised latches, but it’s very doable.

 

 

2) The landing gear doors will also be closed.  In this pic of my subject and many others I can find, the landing gear doors and speed brakes are closed.  That’s just fine with me, because I hate doing lots of landing gear-well detail, then never see it again.  If I can easily see it, like an engine or cockpit, I like to detail the crap out of it.  If I need a mirror to see it later, forget about it. 

 

 

 

 

3) I don’t want to install the front landing gear until the end of the build, because italways in the way and can get damaged.  Like my F-15C Eagle, this kit forces you to do so early unless you figure out a way around it.  I did for the Eagle and I found a way for this Tiger.

 

 

4) I don’t want to install the tire/wheel until both it and the landing gear is painted.  I had this same issue with the rear wheel on my Spitfire, so I’m doing something similar to the front wheel on this build.

 

 

First, I bought some aftermarket resin wheels/tires from Profimodeller, which are made for the Hasegawa kit.  Fingers crossed that they will fit.

 

 

 

 

A close-up pic shows that the detail is exceptional, especially in the axle area.

 

 

 

 

The front landing gear has many parts.  The main gear leg doesn’t fit together very well, while the other smaller parts are OK, but the thin raised detail is hard to remove from the sprue without destroying some of it.

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s the problem.  If you glue the front gear leg together like I have, the axle is closed and you can’t install the wheel later.  Note that I have not done a thing to clean-up the leg yet.

 

 

 

 

However, if you trim back the axle, thin it with a sanding stick and remove the tiny ring from the wheel…

 

 

 

 

You can spread the axle around the wheel and make it fit quite well, without any glue.  Mission 1 accomplished.

 

 

 

 

Here’s the other problem.  The gear leg must be glued within the gear well when it is assembled.  This is just dry fit at this stage, but I did glue the gear door actuator arm, Part C47, as per instructions.  Whether you have the door open or closed, don’t do it.  Again, it’s always in the way and its very fragile, so glue it in at the end of the build if you still need it.

 

 

 

 

So, here’s what I did.  First, I painted the gear well parts gloss black, then Alclad Aluminum.

 

 

Edited January 24, 2019 by chuck540z3

[chuck540z3]

Then installed Parts C9 & C14 and glued the gear well together.

 

 

 

 

Next, I cut off the rectangular tabs on the sides of the gear leg and cut a groove in it’s place that would fit a small drill bit, being careful to keep the angle of the groove the same as the tab, which is about 15-20 degrees.

 

 

 

 

I then cut one short drill bit for the bottom and a longer one for the upper pin with a Dremel tool with a cut-off wheel.

 

 

 

 

Then after opening the bottom hole slightly, I slipped the bottom pin in place.  This pin is necessarily shorter than the top pin, because it gets in the way of the bottom fuselage parts, which have a triangular tab at this very location.  By cutting off the tab slightly, everything will fit later.

 

 

 

 

Thankfully with the gun doors closed, the top pin can be any length, so I left it a bit longer for strength.

 

 

 

 

Now the front gear leg can be glued to the pins at the end of the build, just like I plan for the main landing gear, so I can set the gear leg aside until I do the other two.  Mission 2 accomplished.

 

 

Next up is final installation of the cockpit and IP.  Fingers crossed that this all goes well.

 

 

Cheers,

Chuck

Edited January 24, 2019 by chuck540z3

[A-10LOADER]

Very clever Chuck, great brainstorming.

 

Steve

[Marcel111]

A creative and very effective work around, nicely done!

 

I do wonder why the manufacturers do this kind of stuff, absolutely nobody likes to assemble gear legs into the wheel well at the beginning of the project for the reasons you stated. Do kit designers ever talk to end users?

 

Cheers,

Marcel

[Dragon]

Chuck you should be kit designer! Very ingenious solution.

[chuck540z3]

Thanks Guys!

 

February 2/19

 

 

This next update was fun.  It was the right combination of sufficient kit quality with enough flaws to keep my mind working on how to fix them without too much pain.  Think of somewhere between the 1/32 Tamiya Spitfire gem I last made and the 1/32 Trumpeter A-10 turd, which I managed to polish a few years ago.

 

 

With the cockpit finished, it was time to put it to bed within the front fuselage.  After trimming and dry-fitting it at least a hundred times, it slipped in like a hand in a glove.  As mentioned in my tutorial above, thick CA glue and styrene spacers are the ticket.

 

 

 

 

With glue now bonding the sidewalls, the fit is much better than before.

 

 

 

 

Before I glued anything, I painted the back of the tiny formation lights and glued them into place from the inside.  Warning:  These little suckers are easily lost!

 

 

 

 

Something that didn’t fit like a glove was the gun compartment to the front of the cockpit, due to the thick resin glare shield and IP.  Since I’m not showing the guns, no worries and no need to be neat and tidy- just cut a chunk out with sprue cutters.

 

 

 

 

This cutout also allows you to glue the back of the glare shield to the gun compartment for strength, which is also much needed for the very flimsy join in front of the windscreen.  After careful measuring, this little 1.5mm styrene spacer seemed to be around the right thickness.

 

 

 

 

There are a few flaws on the bottom of the fuselage, most notably the misaligned panel lines.  It’s funny how some are aligned while others aren’t.  Also, according to the reference pics I could find, there’s a long and thin molding flaw along each side.

 

 

 

 

Most modelers who have made this kit have found this flaw on the front part behind the nose cone.

 

 

 

 

While there is a massive gap on the top of it.

 

 

 

 

Fixed.  Note that I use CA glue as a filler for everything, so the clear glue doesn’t totally hide old flaws.

 

 

Edited February 3, 2019 by chuck540z3

[chuck540z3]

At the front on either side of the gear well are gun vent doors that are molded open.  They should be closed and another molding flaw fixed.

 

 

 

 

To close the gun vents, I trimmed the back of the vent doors, deepened the hinge with a scriber, then bent them flat.  They also need to be shortened about 10% and the corners rounded before you install them.

 

 

 

 

Two more areas fixed and the panel lines are now straight.

 

 

 

 

There is a lot of trimming and dry fitting to get any of these pieces to fit together.  Almost every join was modified in order to do so.  Kind of a pain, but kind of fun too.

 

 

 

 

With the styrene spacer used at the front of the windscreen, the join is now fairly flush and the top center piece fits perfectly.

 

 

 

 

Before I fit and glue the gun doors closed, I need to install the guns and modify the parts so that I can install the gun barrels at the end of the build.  Here I have cut the gun breaches back to fit my modifications and used minimal gun parts.  The key is to just get an anchor point to slip the gun barrel into later.

 

 

 

 

The openings at the front of the gun compartment were widened slightly and the base of each gun barrel was narrowed, so they now just slip in from the front with minimal effort.

 

 

 

 

The gun door fit?  Not so good.  This kit is made for doors to always be opened with no parts made for closed doors.  As a result, the fasteners are molded open and the closed fit is crappy.  Time for some more “fun” I guess….

 

 

 

 

Later boys and thanks for your input.

 

 

Cheers,

Chuck

 

 

Edited February 3, 2019 by chuck540z3