1/72 Mitsubishi F2-B Misawa AB

[PaulR]

Hallo all,

Well, my first for 2015. I am on a bit of a Japanese 'kick' at the moment, and the latest is my efforts with Hasegawa's 1/72 F-2B. I've got both the single seater and twin seater in 1/48th, so this was a try out, particularly in regard to the oft discussed colours for the sea camouflage. I added Master pitot tubes and resin ejector seats; these happened to come with the unusual canopy breakers fitted to the ACES2 seats on F-2s. I left it with minimal stores, since the trainer F-2s don't seem to carry much in the way of ordnance.

With regard to the blues of the camouflage, it seemed that every man and his dog has a mix for this, and looking at photos doesn't help; they very (depending on lighting conditions) from a bright blue to a darker more petrol blue. I hate mixing colours because I often make more than one model, and I like consistency, so I was looking for an out of the bottle solution. I know Gunze Sanyo do a set, but these seem very hard to run to earth, and I can't establish if these are enamel or the acrylics I work in. In any instance, Tamiya do my favourite paints, and I eventually settled on XF17 sea Blue for the darker shade and XF-18 for the tricky lighter blue. To my eyes at least it makes a very satisfactory match, and experiments in different lighting show that it changes in the same way as the real paint does. I have a bit of a theory about Gunze Sanyo (probably completely unsupported by the facts) that there is 'crossover between' their range and Tamiya's. For example Gunze Sanyo do an official 'Barley Grey'; when I compared it to the Tamiya XF19 that I use for this colour, the results were not just close but identical. The only difference seemed to be that the Gunze Sanyo was slightly glossier than the dead flat of the Tamiya. Tamiya's market is naturally predominantly Japan, and given that phantoms in the JASDF have worn this two tone blue prior to the F-2s makes me think that they fielded these two shades side by side for a reason. Anyway; all idle speculation! All in all, a cracking little kit, and I am looking forward to tackling its bigger cousins. Apologies for dodgy photography; still wrestling with my new camera.

[batcode]

very nice build, looks great

[stevej60]

Cracking build,great scheme!

[russ c]

Very nice, as Steve said; great scheme