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1/32 Kitty Hawk F-5E/N: "Kicked Up A Notch"


chuck540z3

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Thank you everyone for your kind and encouraging responses.  As I do at the end of every build, I write a magazine article on what I’d did directly from my WIP thread, which is one of the major reasons I do them in the first place.  Reviewing this build from start to finish confirms that this kit is a real challenge to just put together and even more so to correct many panel lines and other details.   Still, I’m pretty happy with the end result, which could never have been done with the old Hasegawa kit, so we modellers should be happy that this kit exists at all as a good platform to create a decent 1/32 F-5E.  What we now need is a good resin cockpit, because the Black Box one that I used is super rare and almost impossible to find.

 

The gloss black finish is another big challenge and although I’m also happy with how it turned out, I’ll never do another one.  As expected, the glossy finish picks up any crap that might be in the air due to static electricity, which forced me to sand down and repaint several areas many, many times.  Even after dusting off the model the best I could, you can still see bits of dust everywhere in my close-up pics above, so that will never go away.  The other major shortcoming of this color on this model is the total lack of available red decals, as I described above.  Even after making do with an assortment of decals and painting some with masks, I’m missing a few that should be there, like the big “AF” at the top of the tail.  I suppose I could have found a way to paint those too, but there comes a time when you just don’t care anymore and need to move on to another project.  As mentioned in my WIP thread, my next challenge will be another Kitty Hawk kit, in this case the T-6 Texan that I will modify slightly to a Canadian Harvard.  After building nothing but iconic fighters for so many years (F-4, F-14 and F-18 twice), I need a new challenge with glossy yellow wings, where the dust should be less noticeable.

 

BTW, my Spitfire below will be featured in the January and February Fine Scale Modeller magazine (2 parter), while my Eagle will be on the cover of a new FSM book on Modeling Aircraft, also in February.  I’m really looking forward to see how these articles turned out!

 

 

FSM "Modeling Aircraft"

 

Cheers,

Chuck

Edited by chuck540z3
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  • 2 weeks later...
17 minutes ago, Finn said:

Great work as always Chuck, for your next project here is something that may be of help:

 

https://www.docdroid.net/ahbi1Ht/north-american-at-6abcd-and-snj-345-erection-and-maintenance-manual.pdf

 

Jari

 

 

Thanks Jari and also THANKS for that service manual!  I'm just starting this model and I was having difficulty finding detail references.  Not any more!

 

Cheers,

Chuck

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