Kit Info
Manufacturer: Hasegawa
Scale: 1/72
Media: Injection Plastic
Plamo is having a Century Birds & Vietnam War Machines Group Build right now. This is my entry.
I decided to model ‘Showtime 100‘ from VF-96 Fighting Falcons. Piloted by Randall ‘Duke’ Cunningham and William P. ‘Irish’ Driscoll, they became the only US Navy crew to achieve ‘Ace’ status (ie. five confirmed kills in air combat) in the Vietnam War. They got their fifth kill in this particular F-4J.
As is typical of them, the Hasegawa 1/72 F-4 is broken down into components that you can swap in and out to make the various versions. Because of this, parts fit can be fiddly in places. Some careful prefitting and adjusting will be needed to keep puttying to a minimum.
As usual it starts with the cockpit. Instruments are provided as decals but in this scale, it’s not too bad. The seats are bare so I added some simple seatbelts made of masking tape. Canopy will be closed so the lack of details for the belts won’t be so obvious.
The intakes are not full length affairs. They blank off about an inch into the intake. So instead of a tunnel-like effect, you just see a wall. Well… you’d see a wall if you really peeked into it. The blank is just deep enough that you can’t really see that the intake doesn’t go forever though.
Parts are many and there are some fitting issues, but all in all, construction was quite straightforward.
Since I’m doing specifically Buno 155800, there are some minor details that need to be made:
The sensor pods on the intakes are omitted.
Hasegawa includes the chaff dispensers near the tail as an open option. This is only specific to the RF variant so they need to be blanked off.
The triangle shaped strengtheners on the stabilizers only appear in later F-4s so they had to be removed.
I had to restore the circles along the spine after I have sanded them off.
The landing gear has been handpainted and given a simple wash.
I preshaded the kit with black-grey. I only preshaded what I think are the major lines. Left the rest as is. Hopefully it turns out fine.
A bit of research turned out the weapons Showtime 100 was armed with when its pilots achieved ‘Ace’ status:
- Centerline 600 gallon tank
- 4x AIM-9G Sidewinders
- 4x Mk 20 Rockeyes on the inboard station on TERs
- 2x AIM-7E Sparrows in the rear wells
- empty outboard bomb pylons
The kit obviously doesn’t come with any weapons. These are all from Hasegawa’s weapons sets. The Rockeyes need a lot of work. Very obvious and ugly mold lines… sigh…
The first thing I painted was the white which covered the undersides, flaps and the tail. I used Model Master Acryl flat white for this and required many passes before the white turned up. It looks fine in the photo below but in real life, it’s still not as opaque as I would have liked.
