EagleOnyx

I work Eagles and the Eagle is my Favorite Bird so my eye might be a little biased and possibly a bit harsh against kits. Its the only plane that I can look at a kit and say "Nope, that panel is wrong" lol

I got mine through Hobby Link Japan for $25 USD plus about $3 USD for shipping each (I had a large order that brought my shipping per item down) so I paid about $28 each for mine.

Ok, here are my photos to go along with this review. I hope it's not overstepping some bounds. Overall the model is very very nice. It's not going to be a shake and bake Tamiya kit by any means, but the details are excellent if only a little softly molded. It won't make an completely accurate F-15C out of the box, but the differences are subtle and wouldn't take that much effort to change. The kit does not come with the larger left vertical stab anti-flutter weight/antenna housing that is found on USA F-15s. There are other antennas that are different for US Aircraft as well that are not included. The radome strips on the kit part are very accurate for F-15J's. It was one of the first things I noticed on them when we flew with the JASDF 2 years ago. The overall General assembly Forward fuselage to rear fuselage joint is not very good and will require a lot of work. This cockpit insert leaves too large of a gap all the way around it, IMO. the side fuselage pieces leave this huge gap near the front, starting at the chaff/flare dispensers forward of the main gear bays. at least the line is straight! The intakes are super rough and will require a lot of cleanup. the wing joints are much much nicer than the hasegawa, they pretty much follow real panel lines and fit positively. There is an abundance of gluing surface area to hold them in place. Link to my full album http://s1129.photobucket.com/user/szlash280z/library/models/Platz%20F-15J

The details are actually raised on the real jet. I just received my kit. Overall the details are outstanding and pretty accurate (Bay 5 is super weaksauce though). The F-15J isn't that much different than the F-15C, the main differences are in the Avionics. I've taped up my model to see how the general fit is and for the most part it is very good. There are a quite a few areas that were disappointing and will require filler. Many of the part joint areas are softly molded and this will cause the finished joint to require filler work. My two copies had flash on many parts and ejector pin marks in hard to repair areas. There is more detail than the Hasegawa kit but it is less refined. The moldings and details are pretty soft, lines aren't sharp and are a little bit too wide. The engineering is really good as far as how the parts will go together and where they chose to separate parts along panels lines. I think it is a nice kit; I just was not impressed by the kit as I expected to be. Honestly I was slightly disappointed. Platz is not in the same league as Tamiya or Hasegawa in the mold department. Honestly, the kit kinda looks like a really good Italeri Kit. I'll post some pictures that I took of my assembly in the morning.

I really like the label paper idea for masks. This is the first time I've seen it and it looks like a cool idea. The Spit looks great BTW!

Yeah man, I'll answer whatever I can. I'm constantly looking at things on the jet with a modelers eye, thinking about how this or that should be modeled so I'd be glad to help. Weird side note: I used to hate the F-15 as I thought it was a cheap knock off of the F-14 (Top Gun child here) I've come to terms with the jet now, knowing that it's extremely potent (18 to 1 KD ratio against Eurofighter, F-16 and F18 in Frisian Flag 2015, most recent example)

I'm a current F-15 Eagle Avionics guy. I wouldn't worry about the paint color in bay 5 honestly. I never noticed the correlation between which ones had green and which were white until I read about it on the internet. I then went out and verified that it was true since we have a range of 78 to 86 models. One thing about it back there that may interest you is that the white paint is very dirty. It's nearly impossible to clean anything back there. I've never seen anyone do anything more than run a vacuum cleaner back there prior to big inspections. Dirt and stuff blows in when the canopy is open and the paint on the floor is usually scratched up pretty good too. I think you are doing an excellent job on this kit. It looks great man!

The real canopies usually have a bunch of swirl scratches all over them. The aggressor paint jobs are also usually not applied very "clean" either. They are usually pretty roughly painted. Most aggressors are among the first F-15C aircraft (IE 1978-80 models) and so usually have the rear cockpit bay 5 area painted in the metallic blue green paint. The 65th Aggressor squadron was sadly decommissioned in August-September 2014. Their aircraft have been dispersed among the remaining F-15 units. My unit received 78-489 which was Blue Flanker but they repainted it standard Mod Eagle before it got to our base. Sad Face. I did see a former Blue Flanker at another unit and they didn't repaint it yet. I was actually shocked at how crappy the blue camo was painted on the jet.

Unfortunately its still against the rules to take photos of that area. Those Japanese boxes are shorter than ours as our (USA) boxes go up to just a few inches lower than the cockpit sill. They are shaped generally the same. The harness is a huge forresty/olive green cloth enclosed bundle that goes along the underside of the sill and spaghetti's out to the boxes. Pretty much all wires in the F-15 are encased in the same colored sleeve. The main harness is apprx the thickness of a 2-2.5" diameter pipe. The last 6-8 inches of each harness is normally wrapped in black tape or mesh at the connector end and should have a small yellow band around it which has the connector number information. Each box typically has 3-4 harness connectors. In the F-15C, the third box from the front is bigger and has a lot more connectors (same height as the rest, but it sticks out into the bay further by 3 inches.) There are six boxes and They are all painted Black. They are heavy and we always bang them into things installing them so they get scratched up pretty good.

I'm not very knowledgeable on German planes, what are the noticeable differences between the Bf models? I know there is one that has some sort of intake scoop on the side of the engine... lol am I an anomaly among aircraft modelers? The rare guy that hasn't built any German kits? If any German plane and a P-40, F-14 or other non German plane kit is on the shelf in front of me I just always pick up a non German kit first. I don't even have a conscious bias against them as I think they look cool (the main reason I choose any kit - coolness) It's weird. I only recently discovered that the BF-109 is the correct designation and the Me-109 name that is commonly used is a screw-up that just keeps going. I thought they were different planes for over 25 years...

Man, that is amazing! What scale is that?

The first one of my Idolmaster kits was an Idolmaster 2 kit. They must have gotten a lot of complaints about the instructions for the decals on the initial Idolmaster releases. the instructions are much much better on the Idolmaster 2 kits because they actually color code the numbers for the decals and give a color installation order. IE: put all the Blue numbers, then Orange, then green, etc. This is so much easier because of the layered effect so you don't have to do so much detective work. On mine, the white trim decals had words and designs on them that are intended to appear as though you are seeing the layers underneath the white. If you look near the wingtip on this photo you can see the words "Touch & Go! Yeah!!" it's part of the entire white stripe decal. I was going to paint the white lines but thought I couldn't because of stuff like that. If I read Japanese I could have seen that they did include those words and designs as completely separate decals for use if you wanted to paint the lines... I say that so that if you were inclined to build another one and did not want to fight with those big white trim decals you could still achieve the correct look by masking and painting instead.

Thanks for the kind words! I was scared that the decals were going to be a nightmare but they actually worked very well.

Hey guys, this is the third Jet I'm building for my friends 35 years of service retirement gift. The kit is the very old Hasegawa 1/72 F-106A. The moulds are showing their age as there is a ton of flash on the parts and some of the pieces don't fit well. The kit also has raised panel line details. Hasegawa was kind enough to produce this kit with my units aircraft included on the box cover and decals inside. That's pretty awesome in my opinion. I bought two of these because I wanted one for me as well. I rescribed the model which wasn't too hard to do. I'm not that good at rescribing yet so my lines are pretty heavy handed and ultimately not very realistic. Meh, it looks ok to me. I'm pretty far along without many pictures as I'm not sure people really want to see a great amount of build photos unless there is some real talent building the kit with scratch building and stuff like that. I'm not a scratchbuilder.

Ok, I've completed the F-16 (pretty much, again I haven't done any of the weapons even though there are only 2 for this jet) I should have put my friends name on this jet too but I didn't. Sad face