For
the history of the FB-111A, I'll refer you to the following excellent
site:
http://www.fb-111a.net/History.html
And
for some interesting and entertaining reading about the Switchblade:
http://www.fb-111a.net/Storybook.html
Click on
images below to see larger images
This
is one of those kits that I never had an inkling to build and never
thought I would until I had one of those "wild hair..." kind of
days! I already had four other Hasegawa Vark variants in the
cache that I planned to build "someday" and figured anymore
would've been overkill... and I never was too fond of the FB with the
white undersurfaces of the SIOP scheme... (would've looked better in black
like the BUFF!)... but I guess that would've been too much like the other
tactical Varks in the inventory and it would be just like SAC to have to
be different somehow. Anyhow, one day I was going through the decal
stash and got to looking at the Superscale Vark sheets I had hoarded away
long ago and noticed that a couple of my sheets included markings for a
SIOP FB and the later 'Dark-Vark' FB's. Hmmm... they ARE
different and one doesn't see FB's built very often (unless they're
as Aussie G's, but no offense though)... I do have the rest of that bottle
of SAC Bomber Green paint that I used on my Ryan's Raiders EF-105F and it
would be a shame to waste the rest of it... hmmm... what else wears that
color of paint?... (gears are a tickin)... where to get an FB?... hmmm,
E-bay seems a little overpriced... and my LHS does have a Hasegawa F-111E
kit that has been sitting forlornly overlooked on the shelves for many
years (and a lot cheaper than E-bay)... I wonder how tough it would be to
convert to an FB? Geez I'm a glutton for punishment sometimes!
Actually,
it wasn't really that tough. All of the Hasegawa kits already include the
round window for the astro-tracker on top of the nose, I just had to use some
flat sheet styrene cut to the right shape, drilled a hole in it, back-plated the
hole and sunk it all into the top of the nose a bit... faired in on
the sides with some filler and had the astro-tracker hump completed. For
the longer extended wings, I had an old AMT F-111F laying around that wasn't
going to get built, so I hacked the wing-tips off of it and glued them onto the
ends of the Hasegawa wings. This took a little bit of grinding down with
my Dremel to get the proper thickness as the AMT wings were much thicker at the
tips than the original Hasegawa ones. I raided my Hasegawa F-111C as a
pattern to get the dimensions correct and get all the proper panel lines
rescribed in this area so that it looked like it came out of the box that way.
The boat-tail between the after-burners was an interesting prospect, but not too
terribly tough. I spent a lot of time pouring over on-line photographs and
pics in my references, figuring out how I was going to trim the bottom rear
portion of the boat-tail to angle it up and rebuild the fuel dump pipe and this
took several different sized sections of Evergreen styrene rod and tubing to get
the shapes all correct and filled/sanded with cyano... but the finished product
came out pretty good and I think I got it close enough to the original piece
that Hasegawa included with their true FB kits. The wing pylons are the
regular Vark pylons that come in the kit, but they've had their forward tips
lengthened with sheet styrene. The instrument decals and HUD options in
the F-111E allowed for the FB cockpit to be done out of the box, so that was no
issue. The only other FB exterior specific difference to the E-model were
the wheel hubs, but I could not find any proof that Hasegawa provided different
wheels in their FB kit, so I used the stock wheels as there's not that much
difference between the FB and the rest of the Vark line as far as their wheel
hubs go.
Click on
images below to see larger images
I
decided to do the wings fully swept and this took a little bit of surgery, but
thankfully Hasegawa provides guides inside the fuselage pieces to show where to
trim for this option. It wasn't the greatest fit, so careful filling and
sanding was required to seal this area up tightly. Getting the slats and
flaps closed up on the wings was another adventure too, but it's doable.
Considering
the lengths to which Hasegawa went to detail this kit, I'm surprised that they
did not include decals on their decal sheet to replicate the RAM panels inside
the intakes. I drew these out in Corel and printed them with my lazer
printer. They're not perfect by any means, but look a lot better than
plain white intakes.
I
decided to paint it in the earlier SIOP scheme as it was more colorful than the
later Dark Vark scheme of the 1980's. The Dark Vark scheme was appealing
since I don't believe I've ever seen a Vark model done in this scheme, but it's
fairly monotone and I'm already planning to do my Aussie C-model in the all-over
gray scheme and my EF-Raven in another all-over gray scheme... so another nearly
monotone scheme just wasn't working for me amongst my Vark collection... SIOP it
would be!
The
Superscale decals for "Lucky Strike" were not complete as they did not
include the blue stripe for the top of the vertical stab and the # 244 on the
nose-gear doors. The stripe was painted on clear decal film using Tamiya
Blue and then trimmed out with an Xacto and applied. The # 244 was done
with my lazer printer.
In
service, one of the standard armament options for the FB was tanks on the outer
swivel pylons and AGM-69 SRAM's on the inner swivel pylons (and whatever was in
the bomb-bay). I initially had some reservations about whether I
could do this load-out with the wings swept, but then I ran across a photo of an
FB in this configuration in flight that proved that it could be done.
Makes for a tight fit of the SRAM's up against the fuselage sides though.
Special thanks to Mike Winn for some SRAM's out of his Testors B-2 kit, much
appreciated Mike!
And
there it is... a kit build totally motivated by a decal sheet, a bottle of
paint and an overwhelming urge to modify a kit to a different variant, just
because! Now what else wears SAC Bomber Tan?......
Oh,
and I haven't seen this discussed on any other on-line Hasegawa Vark
builds, but I've found an error with Hasegawa's instructions to be aware of.
They show attaching the landing light (part Q6) to the forward strut (part
A14)... but it should really be attached to the peg that sticks out of the side
of part A6.
I'd
like to close this article out by saying that the mission for which the FB was
designed/tasked, was an intriguing, awe-inspiring and awesome endeavor... but
thank God it was never asked to complete that mission and now they reside in
museums as relics to the Cold War!
J.C.
|