Revell 1/72 F-89D Scorpion

Laying out the sprues, very nice kit. Bought ages ago and finally picked up to build.

Cockpit is quite nice out-of-the-box, figured out that the F-89D s/n represented by the decals used the F-89J cockpit panels that the kit provides, to which I later added the backseater radar scope which is missing.

Closing up the fuselage, fit is good

Intakes, exhausts and separate canopy frame installed. Do not like this type of kit design but works out well enough. Adding a simple representation of the backseater windscreen, which is missing.

And on to the wings, man this thing is massive!

Canopy installed, it had been scratched in the box but polishing and a dip in HG51 saved the day.

Canopy masked, small air intakes installed and installing and aligning the wings. Fit is OK but care is needed here.

Did not get away without filler but not much needed.

Assembled the massive wingtip pods and already progressing to the priming stage. The wire handle stuck in the tail was a bad idea, cracked open the tail...

Sprayed a white undercoat for the arctic red and the black areas. The anti-glare panel is a decal, with hindsight I would have been better off spraying and masking it.

Colorful bits completed... or not? Got myself a pretty expensive bottle of Insignia Red acrylic "for arctic camo" but this turned out too orange to my liking. Here and there the stuff did not play nice with the undercoat either... Darn.

Oh, and I forgot to mask the white in the areas that will be covered by the B/W checker decals later on. Sigh... Ploughing on nevertheless. Masking the arctic reddishness...

... and another coat of white, followed by Vallejo Metalcolor Aluminium. Great stuff, even I appear to be unable to mess up working with it.

Spraying some panels in Duralumium and the area around the exhausts with a more darkened mix.

Demasked and checking out how it looks, the orange look is still bugging me...

...and after a few days I deciced I had to fix that. Luckily the stores just opened here again so a short trip to the LHS and I had me a much cheaper Vallejo Insignia Red which was sprayed over the orange. Much better!

The area around the exhausts was not dark enough, so some more rework needed here too.

After an epic struggle the anti-glare panel decal was installed with only a small section damaged and touched up. And guess what? I managed to forget the square area around the USAF decal that remained in NMF. Great going, but fixed soon enough.

Checking off the checkers. Loads of decal softener required for the wingtip pods and far from perfect, but it will have to do.

Busying up the rest of the airframe with the remaining decals...

... including the nice shark mouth.

Weathering with pastel powder, bringing out the panel lines and introducing more tonal variation in the NMF.

Brought the main parts together and sprayed on the final satin coat to seal everything up.

Final touches, adding the white surround to the canopy glazing with decals from the spares box, which conveniently hides the sprue gate damage inherent in the kit canopy design.