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Tamiya 1/32 F-15C


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I finished this yesterday and I'm quite chuffed how its finally come out. I bought this at the Yeovilton show last November as the christmas present from my wife. I'd been after one for ages and was toying with the idea of getting one of ebay from china, but they've obviously released it into the European market, so I got mine for £90TM60304.jpg.

I've already got an Tamiya F-15E which was my christmas present some 2 years ago now and that fell together however, this was a different kit; inside its dated 1994 so lessons learned from this one have been put into the E model as I was surprised at how much things didn't fit.

I immediately associate the C with Bitburg as I always remember the photo's as a kid and they were all BT tagged, so I knew I wanted to do a BT bird. I thought I had the paints for this one, but its the earlier light grey as appossed to the MOD Scheme implimented around 1990, so I got the Xtracrylix paints from the internet and its only when you put them side by side that you realise how dark it actually is. I sprayed the base coat and added the dark/bluey grey parts on top by spraying freehand with my faithfull badger 200 (with the V8 compressor). I used the Windor & Newton gloss varnish and the spent a day doing the decals followed by W&N Matt varnish. This was then dirtied using the dark promodellers wash and some carefull application of Tamiya smoke (using the less is more method?) and I think its come out quite well. I've put in 2 small lamps from Little-Cars and then Clearfix'd them in to fill the void. Intake covers are paper mashe - cut & painted, I also added a 53 TFS lettering to spice it up.

The model is meant to be viewed as on Zulu alert, so through reference photo's only the Sidewinders have RBF tags and with that the idea developed about putting the helmet on the side and gloves with a map. I've seen the map done on here before, but its the first time for me and its easy. I dremeled out the helmet and face mask and used Tamiya tape for the helmet/mask elastic. I know I've left the visor down, but a bit of artistic licence is required. The hands were thinned to within a milimeter of their life and I've bent one at 90 degrees and rested it on the cowling, the wrist parts have been hollowed also. You may notice that I added the rifle sight to the right hand side of the HUD and this is a metal rod dipped in wax at one end to get the thicker contour, which has then been shaved and painted. I used the wax method to do the covers on the Sidewinders after they had been painted and decaled, then adding thread as the bungy and then adding more wax to keep the thread in, after this it was all painted and I did a red one just to break it up. Flaps were cut and set at down, as this was done more often than not.

Another first for me was that I used the canopy polishing kit from Little-Cars that I bought over a year ago. This removed the moulding seam right down the middle of the canopy and again it worked a treat and was finished off with Klear.

I've probably not added enough text, but enjoy...............

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Any questions please ask.

Steve.

Edited by speedy
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Liking that one. Whats with the rifle scope on the HUD?

During the post 1991 Gulf War TDY's,many F-15 drivers used scope's to aid the "Mk1 eyeball" in the ID of slow moving targets like Iraqi helos entering the No fly zones.

Anything that would help prevent another blue on blue friendly fire incident like that on 14 April 1994 when two 53FS Eagles shot down two US Army Blackhawks after mistakenly IDing them as Iraqi Hinds...killing all 26 crew/passengers in the UH-60's

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