Airfix Canadair Sabre F.4 (A08109) 1:48

[Mike]

Canadair Sabre F.4 (A08109)

1:48 Airfix

 

 

The North American F-86 Sabre was a first-generation swept-wing jet that saw active service in Korea and beyond in US service, and was license-built by Canadair in a number of variants.  Small numbers of the Mk.1, 2 and 3 were built before the Mk.4, which was destined for the RAF to fill a void in their inventory that couldn't yet be filled by indigenous types.  The Mk.4 retained the GE engine, and were leased by the RAF from 1953 to 1956 as a supposed stop-gap while they waited for the Hawker Hunter, because the previous Meteors and Vampires were by that time outclassed by more advanced swept-wing jets being fielded by both our Allies and the Soviet aligned Air Forces.  Curiously, some of the RAF Sabre squadrons, many of whom were in Germany at the time, eventually transitioned back to Meteors at the end of the lease.  That must have been quite a come-down, akin to going from a Morris Minor to a Trabant.  The airframes reverted back to Canadair, and eventually went out to other customers after being refurbished.

 

The Kit

This is a brand-new tooling of the Canadair built Sabre Mk.4 from Airfix, and there’s been a lot of excitement in the run-up to release.  Since then there has been some chatter about various relatively minor issues, and as no kit is perfect that’s not surprising, but they’re pretty easy to fix once you’ve got your head round them.  The Canadair Sabres have quite a following with Britmodellers due to their RAF service, so you can hardly blame them for the scrutiny.  I’ve cheated and sought the advices of a Sabre aficionado, our own Sabrejet, or Duncan was we call him.  Julien has chipped in a few comments as well, as he’s a bit of a Sabre fan too, with over 70 kits in his stash.  Have a read of the review first, and I’ll link to the discussion thread near the end.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Construction begins in an unusual place for a change, the intake trunking.  It is split horizontally, and has alignment pegs on the outer edges, plus a square of four pegs on the topside to which the cockpit tub is fixed.   The rear deck is moulded into the tub, and here is one of the first areas where a little work might be on the cards if it perturbs you.  The details here are a little simplified, and if you’re detail focused there’s some minor changes to be made.  The seat is put together from the L-shaped base, two side supports and the headbox cushion, which was usually brown, as were the armrests.  As it is inserted into the cockpit tub, the instructions show it briefly with seatbelts, but there aren’t any on the sprues or on the decal sheet, so just ignore that.  A pair of decals are supplied for the side consoles, and another is there for the instrument panel that slots into the front of the tub.  The decals have a clear background, so you’ll be able to paint the panel in the correct colours, which incidentally should be black, rather than the Gull Grey (140) mentioned in the instructions.  A very dark grey with some lighter highlights, followed by a black wash should achieve the desired effect.  The control column has a gaiter at the bottom that has a separate section added to give it the appropriate width.  The cockpit trunking assembly has a set of stator blades fitted to the rear along with a two-part intake bullet, and at the front you have a choice of either the hollow intake lip, or the same part with a FOD guard inserted into the trunk first, blocking off the intake for a grounded bird.  Airfix have helpfully provided a pilot figure in their traditional “hands on lap” pose, and apart from the slightly passive posture, the moulding and detail is good.  Flipping over the trunking, there are some ribs and equipment moulded into the underside for the nose-bay roof, which is boxed-in by a two-part wall, and should be painted interior green, while the doors should be silver.

 

 

 

The fuselage has a couple of holes in the forward end to accept inserts, including the gun bay doors that can be closed up, or left open to show off the gun bays.  The bays are a single curved box, into which the breeches of the guns fit at an angle, with the help of scrap diagrams showing the correct orientation as each one is glued into position.  The magazines are inserted into the lower section of the bay, and have their ammo feeds glued to the top, leading to the gun breeches.  The same process is carried out in mirror image on the other side of the fuselage, then the bays are glued in place from the inside, correctly marked as painted in silver.  The airbrakes on the rear fuselage sides can also be posed open or closed by inserting a closed bay door with supporting ledges that should allow you to glue them flush to the outer skin (possibly after some fettling, so test fitting is essential), or the open bay with the bay doors fitted in the open position later, with the back of the panel painted interior green.  In order to close up the fuselage you need to make up the exhaust trunk, which has the rear engine face inserted in the flared forward end, and an optional circular FOD cover over the hot end.  There are two supports for the forward end that fix into sockets on the inside of the port fuselage, and a moulded-in lip near the aft end slots into a corresponding slot inside the rear, ensuring correct positioning.  You are advised to put 10g of nose weight in the gap between the cockpit and intake lip, but a little more probably wouldn’t hurt, as there’s plenty of space.  The cockpit & intake are also inserted into the left fuselage with the aid of sockets to hold them secure, then a long insert is placed in the area between the tail and the exhaust trunk, which also makes up the lower side of the tail fairing.  If you are modelling your Sabre in-flight, you need to put in the single nose bay door insert in now, and this too has ledges to help with fitting, then you can close up the fuselage and set it aside to cure while you make up the wings.

 

 

Airfix have moulded the lower wing as a full-width part, and many think they missed a trick by not adding a slatted-wing to the moulding, but we might yet see that later – who knows?  Again, if you’re going for wheels-up, the single main gear bay insert should be fitted now, and this too has ledges around the edge to help with alignment.  A pair of pylon holes should be drilled in each wing if you are fitting them (see my note later about positioning), and the bay walls are made up from narrow parts around the rear edge, plus a more substantial front wall that will need a pair of blocks removing if you are depicting your Sabre with the inner doors extended, as these are only used when the doors are closed, again to stop them from dropping inside the bay during fitting.  There’s another nubbin under each door on the front bulkhead, so treat that the same if you’re dropping all the doors.  The bay roof has two depressions moulded-in to accommodate the wheels, and this assembly is fitted into the lower wing, with additional parts installed in the outboard section, and don’t forget to give the upper wing interior a quick squirt of the same interior green, as there is roof detail moulded-in there too.  If you took the decision to open up the gun bays, the very tips of the wing roots should be cut off the wing leading edge uppers along the panel line, as that section is integral to the bay door and is supplied as part of the open door parts.  A scrap diagram holds your hand through this, then you can join the wing halves and fit the hard-edge leading edge lower panels with their chopped off tips if appropriate.  Another hole may be needed for the drop-tanks too.  The short, stocky wing fence is a little broad in the beam thanks to the limitations of injection moulding, which can easily be corrected by thinning it down, or chopping it off and replacing it with thin styrene or brass sheet planted in a razor-saw cut in the correct place.  Before you can join the wings to the fuselage, there are two intakes under the fuselage that are moulded as holes in the lower wing.  The inserts are installed from the inside, so fitting them later would be horrible.  With that, the insert in front of the tail fin is fitted into the upper fuselage, and the wings are attached beneath, adding the L-shaped wingtip and aileron insert to the trailing edge of the outer wing as you go.  The elevators are both single parts and attach with the usual slot and tab method, while the rudder is separate and can be glued deflected as you wish, but don’t forget to offset the control column to save yourself from the purists.  They’ll get you!

 

 

There are inserts to be added above the wing root trailing edge, then it’s gear and bay doors.  If you have elected to pose your model gear up, you can skip this part, but even with the gear down you still have choices.  The main bay inner doors can be posed up by using one part, or down by joining two different parts in a very sharp inverted V-shape, remembering that the short section of bay wall should be interior green, but the door should be silver.  They’re supported by a short jack in the front of the bay, then the main gear leg and its captive door can be joined and inserted.  Here you’ll need to remove the tiny link that has been included in error because Airfix scanned a museum airframe that either didn’t have any pressure in the strut, or was being supported to prevent sag.  Some careful trimming and sanding will have it looking correct in no time, and you can carry on with putting the main wheels on, which will line up the flat-spot with the ground automatically thanks to the axles and hubs having a keyed fitting.  Moving to the nose gear, there are a pair of flip-down landing lights just in front of the bay, and you can depict these in the flush position by using a clear part and masking off the circular lights, painting the rear silver before you install it, or you can use the styrene part and fit the deployed clear lights later in the build.  The nose gear leg is a single part, and fits into a keyed slot in the front of the bay, and has a smaller two-part wheel slipped onto another keyed axle.  A retraction jack fixes to the back of the strut, and the folded front door clips in place either side of the wheel, with a scrap diagram showing the correct location and where it links to the strut.  The rear door can be posed closed or dropped sideways with a strut holding it at an angle, with that and the open lower gun bay doors shown in place on a frontal diagram for your reference, but the upper gun bay panels aren’t mentioned again, so you’ll either have to severely thin the unused closed-up inserts, or tell everyone some erk wandered off with them.  The open air-brakes glue into the fuselage with their stays holding them to the correct angle, and slightly further forward next to the intakes under the fuselage you are given two small parts to locate on tiny depressions between fairing panels.  These are jacking points, and were only fitted during maintenance, so unless you are planning a diorama that involves jacks, leave them in the box and if you can see the depressions, pop a tiny amount of filler in there to make them disappear.  Under the tail there is a small blade to fit into another small depression, which is best left off until after main painting.

 

There are two types of drop-tanks supplied on the sprue, a smaller pair with no fins, and a larger pair with a choice of simple fins or larger fins with a perpendicular stabiliser.  I’m told that the RAF tended to use the smaller tanks, but check your references and see which style your decal choice used.  They fit to the lower wing on quite stout pins, so when the instructions tell you to make 2.3mm holes, don’t skimp on the size.  The big tanks have stabilising struts fitted between the body and the smaller 0.8mm hole in the leading underside panel, regardless of the style of fins.  We understand that the positioning of the tanks is slightly adrift, and should actually be 52.33mm from the centre line, so if you want to get the look dead-on, you’d better get out your callipers.

 

The model is finished off by adding the kinked pitot at the tip of the starboard wing, the optional popped-out lights under the nose, a clear gunsight, and the canopy.  The windscreen is separate from the sliding canopy, and there is an insert that fits inside with a clear “lamp” at the midpoint, which is actually the radio compass loop antenna.  This is a simplification of what is there, and could have been a little better, but it would have required more parts, and those details cost time and money.  As it is, you have a reasonable approximation of the parts in the area, but if you have gone to the trouble of detailing the deck behind the pilot, you’ll probably want to do something similar here, detailing the support cross-member and the cockpit pressure regulator in the very rear.  Once you are satisfied, the canopy can be posed open or closed to suit you.

 

 

Markings

There are two decal options on the sheet, and surprise, surprise! they’re RAF airframes.  They are period correct schemes for the squadrons depicted, with a green/grey topside and a PRU blue underside, although the colours are printed slightly differently from each other on my instructions.  Each aircraft is shown in four views, and empty space around the profiles is taken up with research notes and drawings of the drop tanks and their stencil locations.  A separate sheet shows the locations of the many stencils around the airframe to avoid repetition and cluttering the pages with too many lines.

 

From the box you can build one of the following:

 

• XB984 No.3 Sqn. RAF Germany, Geilenkirchen, 1954
• XB854 No.4 Sqn. RAF Germany, Jever, 1954

 

 

Note that on the paper profiles in the kit, the fuselage codes are presented as T.B from the port side.

 

 

Decals are by Cartograf, which is a guarantee of good registration, sharpness and colour density, with a thin gloss carrier film cut close to the printed areas.

 

 

Conclusion

It’s a welcome new tool with a few accuracy notes mentioned in the text that shouldn't stress you to fix, a couple of colour changes needed during detail painting, but it’s a Canadair Sabre F.4, something that’s been wanted by aficionados for quite some time.  You can find the initial thread on the kit here.

 

Whilst writing, thanks to Duncan (Sabrejet) for the additional information that helped enormously in writing this.

 

Highly recommended.

 

 

Review sample courtesy of

 

[Pagey]

I started this yesterday. The airframes can be built in the closed position without any fettling. I glued the bottom edge first and then the top as they pressure from opposite sides (bottom from outside the fuselage and top from the inside).  The only criticism I have is the panel lines and detail are a bit soft. Might need a going over with a scriber to define them a little bit more

[Josip]

That's exactly the problem with nearly all new Airfix kits. Soft detail and panel lines that are still inferior to japanese kits from the 90s.

[Julien]

2 hours ago, Josip said:

That's exactly the problem with nearly all new Airfix kits. Soft detail and panel lines that are still inferior to japanese kits from the 90s.

Quite the opposite in my view which sets this kit apart. Seen the new Blenheims in 1/48 & 1/72, the new 1/72 Beaufort and the new 1/72 Spitfire and they are all very good.