There’s a general lack of detail in the wheel wells.
The nose gear well is better but not by much. To be honest though, I’m not sure how accurate this is.
The 1-piece upper fuselage clamshells over the bottom but leaves some unsightly join lines at the back. I’m not sure why Hasegawa designed it this way.
Instead of simply making the tailfin left and right halves coming together, they decided to have the inside lower half as a cut-out which causes an ugly join line that also cuts across panel lines.
The canopy comes with an inner frame made of two parts.
The canopy has to be tinted and I used Tamiya X-19 Smoke for it. The real thing looks to have a more prismatic effect but I think it’s OK for this scale. I wasn’t sure if the inner frame would be visible so I painted the parts first before installing into the canopy.
There’s a detonation cord running down the middle of the canopy and it comes as a decal. I made the mistake of trying to attach it AFTER I had already attached the inner frame. I believe it would have been easier if I added the cord first.
The kit is designed with a slot to insert a flight stand. This is cleverly hidden by a kit part. I wish all my Hasegawa Macross kits has this feature since I build all of them in-flight.
Next up is tackling the Electro-Optical Targeting System (EOTS) which houses all the targeting sensors of the F-35. This requires masking…
Ok then… challenge thrown, challenge taken…
I’m hoping for the best at this point as I’m not going to re-attempt the masking.
With the cockpit masked up, the main assembly is done. I decided to leave the tailfins off till final assembly which should make painting easier.
I then hit into a snag: I lost some of the landing gear and wheels. Luckily Hobbyeasy, a Hong Kong based shop, stocked some aftermarket parts for the kit. The first is a set of the landing gear in white metal from Scale Aircraft Conversions.
The replacement wheels are resin and come from Reskit.
The SAC’s nose gear only comes with the torsion links and requires part D4 from the kit to be complete. Somewhat disappointing considering the cost of the set.
The SAC metal landing gear looks exactly like the original kit’s. They really should have added more details but they didn’t.
I still had the kit nose gear so I decided to use that instead of the metal one. The resin wheels were carefully cut from their pour blocks and prepped accordingly.
While the port tailfin was OK, the starboard tailfin keeps having a hairline join line pop up even after numerous attempts with various gap filling methods. In the end, it was subtle enough to be tolerable.
Build Log
Pt.1 – Construction | Pt.2 – Construction | Pt.3 – Painting | Pt. 4 – Finishing
