1/72 Hasegawa Tornado GR.Mk.1

"Buddha"

by Benoit Mathier

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This is my first 1/72 Tornado. It took me about 3 months to build it. The Hasegawa-Kit was a special edition called "desert scheme" incl. decals for Desert Storm Tornados as "Mig Eater" (No 15 SQN RAF), "Gulf Killer"(No 20 SQN RAF) and "Foxy Killer"(No 16 SQN RAF) The Hasegawa Decals look very nice, but the film is as usual to thick.
I've chosen this Buddha-Tornado because to many tornados with above mentioned nose-arts are already built. I used SuperScale Decalsheet.

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The quality of the parts are excellent. The cockpit is already highly detailed. Fitting is ok. Just two areas need more attention: Assembling of the air-intakes and cockpit-main body section are quite tricky.  The Tornado is straight Out of the Box. Just antennas were added (papercard) and the chaff / flare pod is from an Italeri-kit. (Hasegawa provides only two ECM-Pods) Painting: RAF Tornados wear a desert pink. I rather used ModelMaster 4720 "SAND" FS 33531 because of the heavy weathering by sun and sand, which let the desert pink became brighter.
The groundplate was airbrushed with a mix of ModelMaster Sand and Radom Tan. Note: The Aircraft Shadow is also airbrushed.

It was a lot of work to show this Tornado in flight, but it was worth. Proportions and quality of the kit are very good. If you want to see more of this one or other scale-models than switch to: www.ipmsovs.ch (we are a branch of IPMS Switzerland.) 
I hope that this article gives you some motivation and ideas for your next project...
Benoit

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Photos and text © by Benoit Mathier