1/144 Arii F-111G

by Christopher Cooper

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Australia is the only country other than the USA to operate the F-111, and is currently the only country operating these aircraft. These are due to be replaced in 2010 by Super Hornets.

In 1/144th scale we aren't exactly spoiled for choice with F-111 kits. There's the old Arii kit, which is just about decent, and the even older Crown kit, which is not so decent. I got hold of a Revell re-boxing of the Arii kit, and I realised right away that there would be a lot of work involved to bring the kit up to speed. To make an RAAF version I found a decal set by Novascale (Aussie Decals sold via eBay) which covered 1 and 6 Squadron F-111s. I also obtained a few resin detail sets from OzMods.

Work started with the intakes. On the real aircraft these look like quarter circles. On the kit they look far too square, and were fused to the fuselage. I went about trying to re-shape them and separate them from the fuselage.

The kit has no suggestion of a cockpit, not even an opening in the fuselage. I used a resin cockpit tub from OzMods and added a few things like joysticks and panels. This was glued in place after cutting an opening for it. An opening for the nose gear bay also had to be cut.

After comparing the model with some scale plans (never a good idea) I found that the nose was too short by about 4mm, which is kind of a big deal in this scale. To lengthen it I cut the nose in two places and inserted some sandwiched plastic card. I also had to add some card around the top of the nose to build it up to the windscreen. I found the end result to look much more "Aardvark-ish". Considerable filling and sanding was required to fit the forward fuselage to the rear without a visible join.

Once the two halves were joined I took the opportunity to rescribe many of the panel lines on the upper surface and around the nose. Many prominent lines were either misplaced or missing. I also scribed the in flight refuelling receptacle door.

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My attention turned to the rear of the aircraft. The afterburner cans that come with the kit aren't great. They come in two parts, forward and rear. I discarded the rear part and made new ones from plastic tubing and foil for the petal pattern. I thinned down the forward part so that light would show between the two parts when stuck together.

I also found that the burner cans were located too far back on the kit, causing them to protrude beyond the horizontal stabilisers. To remedy this I cut about 3mm from the rear fuselage and ground about 2mm from the back of the burner cans. All this meant I needed to do a lot of filling and sanding to neaten up the rear fuselage. Chaff/flare dispensers were made from stretched sprue and added under the horizontal stabilisers, and the kit ventral fins were replace with plastic card to make them look more in scale. In order to add the tail bumper in the correct location, the bump that runs underneath the aircraft between the engines needed to be extended by about 1cm.

For the main landing gear I used the kit struts and wheels. However the wheels lacked any hub detail, so I drilled out the hubs and replaced them with some taken from a 1/72 Humvee. For the nose gear I extended the kit vertical strut, and cut the diagonal strut from plastic card. The nose wheels are nose wheels from Revell's 1/144 Hornet. The pylons which came with the kit were the wrong shape and lacked detail. I re-shaped them and added a few panel lines.

Australian F-111s all had extended wings. The kit came with the shorter wings, so I used replacement resin wings from OzMods. These appear to be copies of the kit parts with wingtip extensions, so they fitted just as well as the kit parts.

Painting was fairly straight forward. Currently all F-111s are overall gunship grey (FS36118) with black noses. I used Gunze H305 and some Gunze metallic colours for the afterburner cans and surrounding area.

The decals are fantastic, as well as basic squadron markings and national insignia, the set comes with wing walk markings and loads of stencils. The decals are ALPS printed, so some care is require when applying them. The position lights were from the spares box. I applied a wash using Pro Modeller Dark Weathering Wash and sealed the everything with a semi matte coat.

Last of all I added the antennas under the nose and on the spine. I also put in some intake covers to hide the lack of detail in the intakes.

This kit took longer than usual to complete, but I feel the extra work was well worth it.

Christopher Cooper

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Photos and text © by Christopher Cooper