This
project started when I stumbled upon a single photo of a French F-8 Crusader
from 1994 done up in D-Day stripes to commemorate the 50th
anniversary of the Normandy
landings. Armed with this
one picture I decided to build one for myself. So I went out and purchased the
Revell kit (this was the pre-Hasegawa era) and got to work.
The
first thing on the agenda was fixing the kit itself. The panel lines needed to
be rescribed. The ejection seat needed to be replaced. The GRU-7 included in the
kit is wrong and is more appropriate for a Tomcat or an Intruder. The
Crusader’s “bang seat” should be a Martin Baker Mk 5 or Mk 7. Luckily I
had a Phantom ejection seat from an old Hasegawa kit that was a suitable
replacement. The next thing was replacing the kit’s landing gear with a white
metal set to correct the Monogram/Revel’s infamous “belly dragging/tail
sitting” caused by the kit’s landing gear being ” a little off”. With
all of that corrected now it was time to hit the books and start converting the
kit to a French bird!
The
French F-8E is really more like a “J” in that it has double drooping leading
edge slats, larger horizontal stabilizers and an increased wing lift angle. All
these mods were incorporated to slow the landing speeds down to allow the
Crusader to operate on French carriers (Foch and Clemenceau) which were smaller
then their American counterparts. To further complicate the build the French
upgraded the Crusaders to F-8P-“prolonged” with the addition of a new
electronics antennas and ejection seat so that the old gunfighter could remain
on the frontline just a little bit longer until the new Rafale was available.
Incidentally the French government considered buying F-18 Hornets as a stopgap
until Rafale was up to squadron strength but the proposal was shot down. I
decided to modify as best I could by scratch building the Sherloc
antenna on the tail and scribing in the slat lines to represent the double droop
but I left the horizontal stabs alone leaving them unglued for a future”
upgrade”
Click on
images below to see larger images
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The
kit was painted overall Intermediate blue. There is debate as to what color the
last French Crusaders were. Some people say PRU blue, some Intermediate blue. I
went with what looked best to the eye and what I could glean from my references.
The
hardest part was doing the invasion stripes with only a single photo (and a
front-view one at that!!!) as a reference. I just used 6mm Tamiya masking tape
and pretty much winged it! The decals are from Albatross Modelworks and went on
without a hitch. A coat off Testors Dullcoat and an appropriate base and voila!
Happy
Bastille Day!!! Hope you like it.
Anton
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