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Italeri 1/32 F-104G Hellenic Air Force Completed


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Great stuff,  i love large scale stuff and have quite a few 32nd scale aircraft in the stash, unfortunately they're rarely built due to limited space, but love watching quality like this coming together, I'm pondering on joining the me262 gb soon with a trumpy a1 in 32nd scale it keeps drawing my attention from my bench, keep up the good work

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  • 2 weeks later...

Time for another update

 

All of the seams have been rubbed down, and checked with black primer

 

The tail section has been fitted, I decided not to fit the engine section until after the painting as it will make this so much easier

 

I know the instruction say to fit it before fitting the tail section but you can still glue it into place afterwards

 

The wings have been fitted, did notice the right wing fitted better the left one which was loose, plastic card shims took care of that

 

The nose has been fitted and lead shot installed to weight the nose, did not go OTT on the nose weight as the front landing gear is not all that great and I wanted the least amount of weight on this part

 

All on the inserts have been fitted and fitted rather well with no gaps or filler needed, so no re-scribing

 

The only ones that gave a bit of a problem were the gun bay doors  as these were sitting a bout 1mm below the finished surface of the model and only required plastic shims fitted to level

 

But even with that the bottom edge did still pull in a bit, I think the shim melted and the bay door was sucked in

 

I think a bit of time taken to test fit before fitting and removing a bit here and there and or packing out where needed has solved 99% of the fit issues

 

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  • Like 8
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Your F-104 progressing very well! Love all the aftermarket for it. I built an Italian F-104G with this 1/32 kit and had especially difficulties with the tanks and their fuel caps. That needs some dryfitting for sure!

 

Evert

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OK the last update before I prime and start the painting

 

I have found so far with this build its not the easiest kit to build and a lot of care and test fitting is required to get the parts to fit 

 

What I was finding is you needed to think 5 or 6 steps ahead of yourself

 

Example 1, fitting the cockpit I found the left hand side of the fuselage was bowing out, so when it cam to fitting the canopy's and the electronic bay covers the fit was bad, solution fit a plastic card base for the electronic bays behind the cockpit to sit on and glue this to the fuselage inside allowing the side to pull in and sorting the canopy problems  

 

Example 2, checking all of the insert panels for the underside, I found the fit again was not great, most of the time it was the location where the panels were to be fitted needed to be squared off to allow them to fit.

 

Example 3, the speed brakes sat about 1mm to low all this required was shims to raise them up.

 

Example 4, the fit of the tail, engine intakes and nose cone, again lots of test fitting and minor sanding these fitted OK

 

The worst panels to fit were the ones for the gun bay, again lots of test fitting, cleaning up the corners and shims sort of solved the problem, out of all the panels these are the worst fitting

 

The only areas actually requiring filling were around the front windshield to blend this in, a small amount at the training edge of one wing, minor filling on the underside seams, and of course the wing tanks and drop tanks

 

The drop and wing tanks I would say took the longest probably around 2 hours work in total spread over several days to get the seam's reasonable, the main problem as Evert said above were the filler caps trying to get these flush with the surface of the tanks

 

Will post photos if I can get Flicker to let me

 

 

 

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These are the photos I have been trying to post for the update above, Flicker has decided to stop working so switched hosting sites

Hopefully these photos show what I was describing above

This is not really a bad kit it just takes a lot of forward thinking to get the best out of it

 

 

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  • Like 5
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  • 3 weeks later...

Nice work Mike.

If I can a provide a little help, the part of the random in front of the wind screen is not painted grey but a lighter shade of green and it is not wrap around as you can see in these photos:

http://www.airfighters.com/photo/40788/L/Greece-Air-Force/Lockheed-F-104G-Starfighter/32734/

http://www.airfighters.com/photo/90865/L/Greece-Air-Force/Lockheed-F-104G-Starfighter/32734/

Keep up the good work! 

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14 hours ago, vangos said:

Nice work Mike.

If I can a provide a little help, the part of the random in front of the wind screen is not painted grey but a lighter shade of green and it is not wrap around as you can see in these photos:

http://www.airfighters.com/photo/40788/L/Greece-Air-Force/Lockheed-F-104G-Starfighter/32734/

http://www.airfighters.com/photo/90865/L/Greece-Air-Force/Lockheed-F-104G-Starfighter/32734/

Keep up the good work! 

Hi thanks for your input

 

I was aware of this but thought I would show an aircraft with a replacement panel taken from one of the German F-104 the HAF had and has not been painted yet to match the reset of the aircraft. I have also painted one of the wing tip fuel tanks in the German grey camouflage with the orange panel for a bit of added interest

 

 

Looking forward to seeing  some of your work on here

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  • Mike Mcellaney changed the title to Italeri 1/32 F-104G Hellenic Air Force Completed

Great model Mike, really nice. Love all the small details you added, down to the protections on the wing leading and trailing edges (I remember being told that the leading edge in particular was so sharp that unwary ground crews could be easily injured if hitting this.. but the same source believed that the protections were to protect the wing, nobody cared about the ground crews...)

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  • 3 months later...

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