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F-4 Phantom, Revell 1/72


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F-4 Phantom | Revell | 1/72

United States

 

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Finished this on March 26th, 2017. One of the first ones I did after coming back to the hobby after 15 years away.  When I got back into it, there were a lot of modeling techniques I wanted to try, but I didn't want to waste any "good kits" (i.e., new) in case it all went wrong.  So I was pulling models down off the kids' ceilings -- stuff I'd done when i was a kid, or in high school -- to be test subjects. Like my Tomcat, this one started to look very nice, so I really devoted some energy to it, getting some after market decals and stencils.  I stripped the paint off with simple green and rebuilt it from the ground up. 

 

The kit was in bad shape (I think my son had thrown shoes at it or something when he was a toddler), and I had to get missiles from a parts bin and I ordered a dirt cheap Monogram F-4 with no decals or box to get the fuel tanks. I also used the canopy from the ebay kit because it was so much better than the cruddy original one. The landing gears were long gone, as was one of the landing gear doors.  I had to fill the landing gear bay with putty and scribe the door's outline into it.

 

Sorry the pictures are so bad; one of the other things I'm trying to learn is how to take decent pictures of my models.

 

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The after market stencils were way too dark.  It was almost like they had "bold" set on the font when they put it together.  I ended up dusting them over with gull gray to tone them down.  It sounds like it would look bad, but in real life it looks fine.

 

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All my reference photos showed Navy F-4s of this era looking fairly clean (probably because gloss paint sheds dirt better than flat paint), except on the bottom where there were a lot of oily looking stains:

 

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My reference photos of all F-4s show very interesting colors around the exhaust, which I really wanted to get right. I used a base coat of Alclad Stainless steel, which I misted with Alclad Dark Aluminum to take the shine off.  Then I masked the center panel on the horizontal stabilizer and misted it with Alclad steel. The cans were also misted with steel. The raised panel lines were misted with steel and the centers of the panels behind the exhaust were painted with Alclad Burnt metal. It looks more realistic in real life than the pictures I took, but you get the idea:

 

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For fun, here's what it looked like before I started.  This was the best my 8th grade self could do, and I've always had a soft spot in my heart for this particular model/paint scheme, which is why I re-created it.

 

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Thanks for looking, hope you enjoy. Comments, questions and constructive criticism welcome!

Edited by opus999
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1 hour ago, Mark4700 said:

Nicely done. Excellent rebuild. I wish I had some of my old kits to gave a go at because it looks great fun. :thumbsup:

Thanks!

 

Yes, it is great fun!  Kind of like remodeling a house or restoring an old car -- just on a smaller scale. ;)

 

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