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ZM F-4S 1/48


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Back in the late 80s when I returned to the hobby after a 10 years lay-off, I built a lot of Hasegawa F-4s & at the time I thought they were pretty much state of the art.  Yes, the early issues had raised panel lines, yes the cockpit was a bit sparse (nice seats though) & there was absolutely nothing down the intakes but with all the different marks they produced, coupled with the various upgrades & decals provided by AM suppliers, it really was possible to produce a reasonably accurate model of pretty well ANY F-4 in service with ANY operator - full marks Hasegawa.  Move forward 30 or so years & we have the Academy kits.  To be honest I don't find these to be much of an improvement over the Hasegawa kits - the cockpit is stills sparse, the seats are no better (IMHO probably retrograde) & the main u/c is poor.  On the plus side new technology provides that one-piece fuselage.  Now we have the ZM kits which surpass the previous offerings significantly.  The only area where there seems to have been no progress is the seats which are better than Academy but no better than Hasegawa.  It's a nice model with lovely surface detail, nice AIM-9s & -7s, nice cockpit.  It also features good, strong location for the main u/c legs & stabilisers - these areas were always an issue for me with the other manufacturer's kits.  Only a single decal option though - tight!  I wonder whether ZM could be persuaded to produce UK Phantoms?  Anyway, pretty well OOB.  The only issue of any consequence I encountered was with the missile decals where the brown bands went on a treat whereas the yellow bands simply refused to wrap around the bodies without repeated softener application & even the I'm afraid they're a bit poor so please don't look too closely!  

 

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