Unlike most aviation fans, I’m not that much of a fan of the F-15. But it’s one of the more important fighter jets of the 20th/21st Century. And of course I want to have a ‘teen fighter’ collection so here we are.
Likely overshadowed by newer releases, this Hasegawa offering is at one point, the only game in town for a modern take on the F-15E Strike Eagle (ie non-prototype). This particular boxing had updated parts to depict a production standard F-15E. Let’s see how it builds up!
We begin as usual with the office. Details are acceptable and the seats even come with the belts molded on. The lap belts however are missing so I added them using masking tape.
Once painted up the cockpit looks quite nice. I used the decals and conformed them over the raised details using a healthy dose of Mark Softer.
My main reference for this build is Scale-A-Thon’s F-15DJ on YouTube. In it, he advised assembling the intakes into the lower fuselage first to get the best fit before fitting the whole assembly into the upper fuselage. This will also allow you to fix the gaps in the intakes first.
The gun bay has a very obvious gap when the two halves come together. I added plastic plate to as a spacer to close it.
The intake ramps are installed and prepainted with Gunship Gray as they’ll be hard to reach once the two halves are put together. I also did the same with the intakes which starts gray but changes to white closer to the intake fans.
Hasegawa calls for some modifications to the fuselage to depict the F-15E so I went ahead and did them now.
The stabilizers fit using the pin and hole method. Not great as they fit very loosely. I used plastic plates to add more real estate for the stabilizer pins to connect to.
Much better now…
A dryfit of the spine to the fuselage shows a large step at the join…
I added spacers to raise the part.
Much better now!
I believe the airbrake is meant to be displayed in the open position as the closed position didn’t quite fit properly. Some elbow grease was required to fair it into place.
All modern F-15s have a GPS dome on the upper fuselage next to the airbrake and I made one by punching a circle out of styrene sheet.
So far so good and I haven’t faced too many problems. Work continues…
Build Log
Pt.1 – Construction | Pt.2 – Construction | Pt.3 – Painting & Finishing
