have a separate bottle, visible in
a cut-out at the bottom left of the
seat back. It’s a minor point, but
this (and the absence of belts) is
one area that could be improved.
Decals are provided for all the
panels, but with the exception of
the instrument dials the detail
seems strangely lacking. I couldn’t
see them settling down over the
raised detail, so I painted them
as best I could. The Instrument
panels in particular are very
nice, and with the raised detail
present in the dials they look
good after careful painting.
At this point ZM, offer you what
is, I feel, a slightly odd option.
There are parts provided to let you
pose the stabilators (the Phantom
doesn’t have what you might call
“horizontal tails”) with a nose-
down attitude, but this does involve
some fairly serious surgery to the
fuselage halves. The instructions
cover it in detail but I wonder why
you would spend the time to do
it, and take the risk of messing
it up, when you so rarely see the
stabilators at any angle other than
the one provided by the basic kit.
It would probably be appropriate
if you were depicting an aircraft
under power, landing, or taking off,
but with no pilot figures included
to justify it, this seems very odd. I
decided to leave well enough alone,
fitted the cockpit assembly (which
includes the nose wheel bay),
and joined the fuselage halves.
And so to Stages 8 to 10, which
require some choices; from the
point of view of the instructions,
the choice is an aircraft with LORAN
or one without, but there are other
options. If you’re sticking with
the kit markings you’ve got todecide whether to fit the LORAN
towel rail antenna and use the
appropriate Radar Homing and
Warning (RHAW) rear fairing on
the end of the tail but...early -Ds
didn’t have the RHAW fairings
fitted so you could leave the nose
fairing off and use the early fin
cap provided in the box, which
gives you more alternatives.
To be honest, I had already
decided that I wasn’t going to use
the kit decals. I have had a sheet
in my stash for ten years awaiting
a state-of-the-art kit. This sheet
(Hi-Decal HDL48025) supplies some
interesting Air National Guard and
Air Reserve schemes; a Korean
example; and two Iranian aircraft,
one pre- and one post-revolution.
Those schemes made the
choice of whether to use the towel
rail or not easy. None of them
are LORANed, so I could push
back the decision on the RHAW
features for now, and the nose and
the fin tip could be added later.
It’s worth mentioning that myresearch suggested that, as well as
the towel rail, the Weapon Systems
Operator (WSO) and pilot cockpit
displays had a layout unique to the
LORAN jets. This could drive you
crazy, if you’re very concerned
about total accuracy, and given that
the kit doesn’t provide alternative
cockpit parts. I struggled without
success to find any pictures that
would show me the differences
between LORAN and non-LORAN
cockpits (Can any reader help
here? Ed), so I moved on.
I now fitted the two spine
parts, and as I said in my earlier -J
review I really don’t understand
why ZM have positioned the sprue
gates where they have on the
fuselage halves. They are quite
happy to attach onto the mating
surfaces for some parts, but for
the fuselage halves they have put
them somewhere that requirescleanup. Given how good the rest
of this kit is and how cleverly the
parts fit mostly on panel lines, I
just don’t get it. Having said that,
however, ZM’s assembly is still
better than trying to clean up a
seam down the length of the spine.
The part that goes behind
the rear cockpit has two tube-8 • AUGUST 2018 • SCALE AVIATION MODELLER INTERNATIONAL
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