1/48 Revell F-8E (FN) Crusader (D-Day)

by Anton M. Alerte

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  France National Day 2006 - Bastille Day 

 

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

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 

Photos and text © by Anton M. Alerte