Scale Aviation Modeller International – March 2019

fan and coaming are
connected to. It sounds
a little complicated but
does actually work out
quite well thanks to the
engineering from HobbyBoss.
One disappointment is that
there are no exhaust fans to the
rear of the engine (something
that the Italeri kit does provide)
so you can look up the engine
and see the back face of the
front compressor blades. To
eliminate this, I decided I
would add a circle of cut styrene
painted black to hide seeing
the blades. Prior to gluing the
halves together, I painted the
insides black to minimise the
lack of detail on view. The it
of these wasn’t too great and
to get rid of the prominent
seams some iller
and sanding was
required to make
them disappear.
Once polished up I
painted them Exhaust
manifold from the Metal
Colors range by Vallejo. The
engines are then ofered up
into a one-piece top half section
with a lower section on each
side closing them in. This unit

is then added to the fuselage

top. The it again was pretty

good with only a slight smear

of iller and sanding required.

I did lose a little surface detail

in the way of panel lines which

were re-scribed. With the main

airframe complete it was time

to prime and start painting.

PAINTING AND

DECALING

I primed the model with Vallejo

Light Grey Primer and left this

to dry overnight. Whilst this

was drying, I decided to look at

the weapons I’d be adding to the

aircraft. I chose a mixture of

bombs AGM-65, GBU-8, MK.20,

AIM-9L Sidewinders & an

ALQ-131 Radar jamming pod. I

glued them all up and left them

overnight to dry and turned

my attention back to painting

the next day. Once the primer

had twenty-four hours to dry,

I went around the airframe

pre-shading the panel lines and

adding some high and lowlights

on inner panel sections to give

some variance and weathered

paint appearance through the

main colours. The main colours

I used were all Gunze Aqueous

H308 (FS36375), H306 (FS36270)

& H339 (FS16081). I found that

H306 was a little to close to

H308 and that there wasn’t

much of a diference between

the two colours something

that wasn’t the case when I

looked at reference pictures.

H306 looked too light in my

opinion so I decided to add

some H305 (FS36118) to darken

it somewhat. I think this

deinitely made a diference

and certainly looks as close to

the colour as possible. The irst

two colours (H306 & H308),

were laid down freehand,

with the third (H339) added

by masking using Blu-Tac

‘sausages. These were left

to dry for a couple of days to

I then applied the

camouflage colours to

the upper.....

...and lower areas

SCALE AVIATION MODELLER INTERNATIONAL • MARCH 2019

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