I started this 1:48 Hasegawa kit
about 10 years ago, and got stalled mainly by a lack of a working airbrush.
It
sat mostly assembled for quite a while until I had the time to sit down and
finish it. Oh, and bribe some friends
with beer to use their airbrush setups. I’m glad for the delay, because along
the way I picked up Leading Edge’s CF-18 decal sheet, which was a drastic
improvement in size and colour accuracy over the decals in the kit. The
Leading Edge decals do need a lot of patience, as I did have problems with
breaking decals. The best remedy for this seemed to be to let the decal soak a
little longer, and then literally float it onto the model surface. The
elapsed time to completion also expanded my sense of craftsmanship and
attention to detail, although my end results aren’t nearly as intricate as
some of the work I’ve looked at on this site. Another positive was that it
gave me a chance to correct something I passed over before. The pilot figure had
an old school HGU-33 style helmet, and back when I started, I accepted this Life
Support Equipment inaccuracy.
Click on
images below to see larger images
Well 10 years later I couldn’t take it.
One night I decided something had to be done, so with the pilot already
glued in the cockpit, I put the helmet under the knife, shaved it down and
repainted it for an appropriate Gentex style look. This is the first model
I attempted to weather, and after checking some pics, decided that the
grease and boot scuffs, with the odd bit of streaking fluid and some heavy
gun
exhaust seemed the best route to go. I also chose to hang something off
the jet, and took a little liberty with the inert LGB on the left wing.
I
had already committed to a blue flightsuit back when I started it, so it
had to
be a training round to match. A funny thing happened as I glued the left
pylon/fuel tank combo on: I had looked at pics from Combat Archer where
CF-18s doing live drops carried the asymmetric load of a tank on the right
wing and centerline, but no tank and 1 or 2 500 pound LGBs on the left
wing pylons. The loadout made sense the instant I glued the left tank on
and realized how much of the targeting pod’s field of view is obstructed
by it.
Doh! I can see for training purposes when
jettisoning the drop tanks isn’t a popular option that the asymmetric
loadout makes sense. Other than that minor detail, I know this isn’t
going to drop jaws like some others I’ve
seen here, but it’s the best one I’ve done and I like it.
Colin
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