Lockheed F-35B Lightning II

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This is a Kitty Hawk kit I bought in 2020.

I wanted a 1/48 F-35B, and this was the only kit available in 2020. Today, I strongly recommend you to go for the Italeri kit (2022), or wait until Tamiya maybe makes one. If Trumpeter (who bought Kitty Hawk I believe) re-boxes this kit without retooling it, do not buy it.

This is a mould from 2012, and it's not great. Plastic is too soft, instructions come with inconsistencies, mistakes and omissions, lots and lots of ejection-pin marks, and overall just below average quality.

Bad engineering decisions plus bad fittings meant, for instance, that wing root seams will be terrible unless you are a master on filing and fixing seams, while retaining the detail. Stabilisers also suffer greatly from that. Overall,

While the Black Dog resin parts and Eduard's BIG set really help to add some missing details, you still have to scratch build the exhaust nozzle to take it to acceptance levels.

This build was above my skills, and with the timeframe that I had, I rushed it and wrapped it up with little care as it was not an enjoyable build.

My clumsiness around CA glue made a big mess on the canopy, and I still found ejection pin marks later in the build. Overall, this build helped me to work out on many details I am bad at, like masking, gluing or being more methodical on the proper assembling steps.

The good:
- It didn't finished in the trash can, that's a win
- Eduard PE set is a must. The lift fan looks way better with it, so the great cockpit.
- Scratch building the exhaust nozzle was fun
- Decals have a lot of options, although there is little info on some of the versions

The bad:
- you get what you paid for. For this complex airplane, just pay whatever Tamiya will ask for it - it is work every dollar if you don't have to worry about fittings, seams and ejection pin marks through the whole build
- no decal info, you have to use pics as reference, or Italeri instructions
- misleading/no color info on instructions for the kit, on the mask, on the resin parts