This is my Pig that
took 7 months to me to be finished because of lot of things to do outside
modelling (I never took that long to build a model).
This aircraft is a
former USAF F-111A used in Viet-nam, it was sold to Australia in 1982 which
fitted it to C standard keeping its SEA camo scheme. In the nineties, it got its
sadly dark sea grey scheme.
I chose to use
practice weapons from an older Hasegawa kit, I don't think that it's an usual
ordnance which is depicted here because the AIM-9b was almost never carried by
the aircraft, and bombs are missing (didn't have enough of it) on the rear BRU
attach points (I beleive this configuration is called « flat four »,
if I read this well...).
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It was almost built
out of box as I didn't use any aftermarket on it, only some scratch things in
the cockpit and the wheel wells, I also made new air intake conducts as there
are none in the Hasegawa kit.
The fit around the
fuselage was poor, I had to force the kit to take it's shape and mastic were
much used. The wings went OK without problem.
I particularly liked
the jet exhaust, and painting it was great fun, finding the perfect match was a
good time passing job. I used Gunze colors (classical TAC SEA federal standards
30219/34102/34079/17038) adding white at a ratio of 15 % for avoiding the scale
effect tone down, I did a very light juice in the panel lines
as those aircrafts are always clean.
The decals are the ones from the
box. After the application, I forgot to seal them with a glossy varnish and when
I put the final satin coat, I saw silvering almost all around the aircraft, the
modeller's nightmare.
I had hard times to get rid of
it, the classical method (micro needle holes with application of micro sol)
didn't work. I had to wipe out the satin coat and do the job again (micro sol
application several times, taking care to let dry between applications).
Finally, after having sprayed a
new satin coat the problem disappeared, the pictures show it and I think I won't
forget this « sealing decals with glossy varnish » step again...
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To conclude, I'd say that this is
not a kit for beginners as everything doesn't get together well on the first
time, but I think it's still the best representation of this aircraft in this
scale.
This is some links for more
information about those RAAF varks :
There are plenty of references on
the net about this nice aircraft.
Hope you liked mine.
Pierrig
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