Ben Brown

Cars I miss: 96 Mazda MX-6 V6. Loved that car. It wasn’t the fastest thing on the road but it handled well and was a hoot in the handful of track days I did with it. Sounded good and the styling was hard to beat. 86 Integra LS 5-door. Handled well, was fairly quick for its day, and was as reliable as an anvil. It was also the first car my wife and I bought together so there’s the sentimental thing, too. 04 Mazdaspeed Miata. I’m about to sell it and I’m sure I’ll miss it, even though its replacement is a 23 BRZ Limited, which will probably end up being my favorite of the cars I’ve owned. Cars I don’t miss: 75 TR7. Enough said. Should’ve bought that 914 I was also looking at. 04 Acura RSX Type S. It was a great car, I really wanted to like it, but I never could find a comfortable seating position in it. I once drove it 5 hrs to the Road Atlanta race track and by the time I got there, my back was hurting so badly I literally had to crawl out of the car. Ben

Looking forward to watching your build! This brings back a lot of memories. I built two of these simultaneously about 30 years ago, a red one for my dad and a BRG one for a friend of his who had a green TC in his garage. Dad was one of the co-founders of the NC MG Car Club. Ben

“Land” might be a bit too optimistic a term for what will happen at the bottom of the slope! 😄 That said, I remember seeing a HUD video from an F-16 that managed to make a dead stick landing on an uncontrolled civilian airfield, dodging a Beechcraft Bonanza on final in the process. It took place in the mid-80s. Ben

Is this what you're looking for? Ben

Looking forward to this one! I guess they canceled the 911 GT3R they had announced at the same time they announced the RSR? Ben

Back when these were being built, a guy in my town bought one and had it painted red. It actually looked better than the stainless steel ones. Not that it was a good looking car to begin with. Ben

Definitely a good question to bring up. In this case, the shop just provides the printing service and the models would just be one-offs for my own use only. The shop does a lot of printing for the local gaming community but won’t sell copies of the models they print. Ben

Thanks, Lee! I’ll check my math several times before I do anything. Ben

Hi All, Apologies for a very basic question: I’m just starting to learn Fusion 360 with the end goal of eventually resizing some models I’ve found online so my local hobby shop can print them. One of the models I’m looking at is an assembly kit with ~50 parts in separate files. The original model is 1/64 and I’d like to scale it down to 1/72. If one were to reduce the size of each piece, would I have a fairly reasonable chance of having everything still fit together properly? I understand that some tiny details might be reduced in size to the point where they can’t be printed, but overall, is it as simple as telling the software to reduce the model size x% or does the way the software works make it far more complicated than that? I’m afraid I’ll start with something that fits together like a Tamiya kit and end up with a resized model that fits together like an Eastern European limited run kit. Thanks! Ben

I can’t add anything other than to say the 131st had the absolute best looking shark face ever put on an F-4E! Ben

Thanks for posting these pics! This is one of the (many) things I miss about the Smithsonian’s now closed Paul S Garber facility. You could go through and see the restorations up close and talk to the people working on them. I got to watch most of the progress of the restorations of the Ar 243 and Sierran back in the 80s. I just wish I’d thought to take more photos! Ben

I just skimmed through the F-4E flight manual that’s available on the F-4 Phantom Society’s web site and there’s no mention of using the speed brakes in the section on normal landing procedures. Ben

The areas under the slats are the same as the surrounding camouflage color. Here’s a walk around of the NMUSAF jet that shows most of the antennae: Link Part 95 - one goes on the forward nose gear door and one goes on the fuselage spine, just aft of the hump for the cockpit. Part 125 and 126 can go on the aft nose gear door and on the fuselage spine to starboard of the centerline, just aft of the inflight refueling door. Usually the straight one was seen on the fuselage, but the jet at the NMUSAF has a straight one on the nose gear door. R5 and R6(are they the same as R5?) probably go on the sides of the nose - they’re the black rectangles in the photos. R7 on the sides of the tail above the W? It’s hard to see what they look like in your photo. Not sure about the ones you’re holding. They look a little bit like the single blade antenna found under the port intake on some F-4Es, but I’m not sure. Ben

You’re welcome, Mark! Looks like 69-0298 did have the stab stiffeners: Link to photo Ben

The outboard section should be painted FS 36118 Gunship Grey on a Hill Grey II camouflaged jet like the one you’re building. The arrowhead-shaped stiffener plates were also painted. IIRC, the natural metal parts were stainless steel with the dark bit being titanium. The fixed slat area on the leading edge was bare metal almost all the way down to the tip. This page has several photos of the stabs on different versions of the F-4: LINK They’re museum jets, which are usually suspect painting references, but these all have the stabs as they were seen on operational jets. The stiffener on the TD coded jet was painted, but the paint has worn off. It looks like the instructions have you painting the underside light grey as in the early Hill Grey I scheme. The underside should reflect the topside, with the dark and light grey sections: LINK The drawing is labeled Hill I but is actually Hill II. Link to photo of actual jet HTH. Ben