1/72 Academy F/A-18C Hornet
VMFA-212 Lancers, product # 12411
(Price) $13.50 from EricYYmodel.com
This is the latest edition to the
72nd scale F/A-18 Hornet family of model kits. The Hasegawa kit is outdated and
has a few drawbacks. The Fujimi kit is said to have an incorrect shape of the
curve of the nose and spine, and is much more expensive and harder to find. The
Academy kit provides modern equipment (IFF on nose, LGBs for weapons) and does
it with an all-new tooling. I would say it is a most welcome change,
considering the age of the previous kits.
Please forgive the quality of the images, my regular camera is unavailable and
I'm using my 2.0 mp camera phone. Lighting is inconsistent because there is no
flash.
I will be honest: The price is a turn-off for me. It's a bit hefty. I might not
have bought it if I hadn't found such a good deal on it. I told myself "you
know what, I'll get maybe one, but I won't go stocking up like some folks
do" and time will tell if I get another kit later. Then again, I'm
frugal in my 72nd dealings, and have noticed this is the trend in recent years,
so it may just be how things are from now on. The up-side is that for that money
you are getting a very decent kit.
Click on
images below to see larger images
The kit is molded in 5 sprues (4 of dark
grey, 1 of clear plastic) with a large number of parts. The molding is
crisp, clear, very well defined inside the detailed areas, and has no
flash to speak of. It is quite impressive. The surface parts have a slight
orange-peel texture to it. Not enough to detract, but just enough to
give it a diffuse texture. I imagine this will help immensely with paint
adhering to the plastic. The panel lines are nicely detailed, but recessed
enough that they will survive a coat of paint. I've had a number of small
72nd kits lately
that think hair-line panel lines are a nice thing -- which they are, at
least until the first layer of paint obliterates them. I'm glad Academy
made them deep enough.
The parts breakdown is fairly logical. There are intake trunks, but they
extend only about 1/2 an inch. This is better than nothing. It also leads
to a much better curve inside these intakes. Normal "walled-off"
intakes don't have the right internal wall shape. While these are short,
they definitely look better than the Hasegawa or Revell of Germany,
which have about the same depth. The parts are a fine balance between
brittle and pliable. Soft enough to work with, but strong enough not to
have to worry about breaking them as you work with it. On the sliding
balance (extremes being "brittle" and "soft") the
quality of plastic lies just off-center leaning towards the
"hard/brittle" side of things.
There is one area where parts layout is not very logical. The nose. The
upper fuselage is all one piece, which is nice. However, the lower nose
all the way back to the intakes is made up of no less than 4 pieces, not
counting the fuselage that they attach to. This is basically a box with 4
walls, but as you can imagine it means that dry fitting and test fitting
is a total nightmare. It takes ungodly amounts of fiddling to hold in
place, and plenty of annoying tape if you don't want to hold it. I think
it's noticeable over-engineered. However, the way it is modeled allows
high quality detail to appear under the fuselage by the nose gear and
around the nose. This is a plus. I just wish it were more inter-locking to
avoid fitting it all together at once. The two sides
meet and the bottom "cap" rounds out the shape. However on mine
the bottom "cap" wasn't a perfect fit and is just a hair too
wide for the sides. I've been able to correct this by scraping it with a
hobby knife. You will need to glue the left and right to each other while
dry fitting them into the fuselage upper half, so that they have the
proper width when you need them later.
The overall detail is admirable. The
late-model sparrows have the box down one side (data pathway, if I recall?), the
LGBs have separate rear fins to make the aft end recessed properly. The
targeting pods are quite nice. The weapons sprues share one engine exhaust, one
seat, one stabilizer fin, one wheel, and many of the parts that are needed
twice.
They simply give you two sprues that are identical. The pro to this is that you
get 2 drop tanks on each, for a total of 4 (you won't need to raid spares to do
a 3-tank, or even 4-tank, setup). You get a VER and two LGBs (which means 2x
VERs and 4x LGBs total) and one sparrow and one sidewinder missile (2x each
total). However, they assume you are going to mount drop tanks and VERs, and
don't supply anything else. It is nice to have 4 LGBs in a kit, but with no
other options seems a bit lacking.
One major flaw in the details is the detailing on the main wings. There is a
noticeable trench/gap where the flaps meet the wing proper. There are 2 problems
with this. First, on the real plane this is almost a
smooth juncture. Second, the trench is molded in the wrong place, up at the
panel line past the flaps/wing joint. It will need to be puttied in and smoothed
out, for sure. It's an oversight on Academy's part. There
are resin kits made for this model that will simply replace the wings if you
want to drop the flaps or fold the wings. Either of these would avoid the issue
of the gap/trench altogether, but cost as much as the kit itself.
Another major flaw that this kit shares with the Hasegawa kit is the extremely
shallow depth of the landing gear wells. You could never fit the landing gear in
there if you wanted to. At least the RoG kit had proper depth. The nose wheels
wouldn't fit at all in the nose well. I find this severely detracts from the
quality for me. It reminds me of those cheap old 1960s kits that had the barest
of depressions to simulate landing gear wells. However, if the rest of the kit
has been made to reflect a decent F/A-18 Hornet, why did they skimp on the wheel
well accuracy? This is a blunder on their part. It won't detract from the kit
per se, but in my eyes I was hoping for more.
Not to be outdone, Academy has released a MASSIVE decal sheet with this kit. It
has hundreds of stencil/data details, including shades and grid details for
vents, exhausts, grill-plates, lights. It is extremely
comprehensive and to quote the Dark Lord of the Sith, "Impressive!"
For me the issue will be using my after-market decals and trying to figure out
what stencil/detail decals to use along with those. While the decal
sheet is a work of well-planned art by itself, the individual markings they
chose for their kit are rather bland to me. I like the really colorful
eye-catching hornets, and just a flash of blue on the fins isn't enough for me.
No offense to anybody else; that's just my preference. In conclusion, you have a
well-molded kit but it has a few incorrect details. It's over-engineered in an
important area, and may be tricky to fiddle with. However, it's also an easy kit
to assemble. Aside from the nose I've run into no problems assembling the parts
yet. They all fit
with modern Tamiya/Hasegawa quality. I like the crisp details and the plastic
quality, as well as the texture on the surface. I love the effort they've put
into their decals and hope they do more of this in the future. Overall it is
definitely a great kit to have. It will be "the" decent 72nd kit to
buy for a Hornet now, despite the hefty price.
If you're going to pay for a good kit, you'll get this one. If you don't want to
spend the money, get a plain old Hasegawa kit and aftermarket decals.
Mark
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