One of my oldest Shelf Queens, I started this kit in 2008 and had never finished it beyond the start of painting. I figured I should finally finish it up.
My initial cockpit work from 2008. Belts were done with masking tape.
The F-4J doesn’t have the arrowhead reinforcement plates on the stabilizers. These were removed with a chisel.
My rescribing skills left a lot to be desired but oh well.
For some reason, Hasegawa includes open photoflash cartridge launchers even though it’s only a feature on RF-4 variants.
The fit of the launcher doors aren’t great and will need to be fixed.
Going over what I had done so far I noticed that I didn’t attach the small vents on each side of the nose and I’d since thrown away the box.
I looked at reference pictures online and decided to see if I can scratchbuild the vents instead of sacrificing another kit for them.
So it’s out with my stash of plastic plates.
In the end, the right thickness was a stack of 1mm and 0.25mm plates.
Then it’s carefully sanding the pieces into shape.
Weapons-wise, as I’m building VF-96’s Showtime 100 on the day of its 5th aerial victory, the F-4 will be armed with 4x AIM-9G, 4x Cluster Bombs and 2x AIM-7Es. These were prepped a long time ago so I only cleaned them up further and also added some details to the tailfins on the AIM-9s with masking tape.
No box means I’m also missing all the antenna parts. Nothing that a reference photo and 0.25mm plastic plate can’t fix though.
I also replaced the pitot tubes on the tailfin with stretched sprue.
There are also antenna blades under the nose.
With all that done, it’s time to re-prep the kit for painting. There were still gaps and seamlines that I chose not to address then which I will this time. There’s also the shoddy paintwork I did back then which I believe was sprayed at around 30 psi and was done from too far away resulting in a pebbly finish. I’ll need to sand the whole kit down and buff everything smooth before painting can begin.
Build Log
Part 1 – Construction | Part 2 – Painting | Part 3 – Finishing
