ESCI F-111A

The loot. Some assembly had been done but otherwise the kit was complete. Decals look useable.

The main wheel well was rather bare so I added more detail using solder wire and scraps of plastic. Gear was already assembled.

Next up the intakes. These are rudimentary so I disassembled them and opened up the fuselage.

The thickness of the splitter plated helped in modifying it to look more like the Triple Plow I config.

Compressor faces from the spares bin (actually 1/32 spoked car wheel hubs so don’t look too close...). Filling seam on wing underside and cut slots to allow pushing in of wings after fuselage assembly.

Intake “ducting” installed

Assembly of the mid fuselage. What was ESCI thinking when they engineered it like this... Probably moulding limitations. Terrible to align correctly.

First paint is on. Added missing consoles etc to canopy bridge.

Forward fuselage assembly, no problems here. Cockpit is out-of-the-box, wit only some sidewall detail added.

Installing the bomb bay lower panel. Kit detail is incorrect, removed hump on centerline and rescribed doors. Lots of work on this small area...

Assembly of front and rear fuselage. Trying to get everything lined up correctly, kit design is not really helping here...

Worked out pretty well but still needed tons of filler to smooth everything out.

Lots of sanding later, checking and covering scratches with Mr Surfacer. Getting there...

And still to start on the upper side.. I strenghtened the wing hinge pins with copper wire to make sure the pin does not fail when I push in the wings.

More assembly...

Filled the gap with strip...

... and lots of filler needed to smooth out the local “valley”.

And done! This one will definitely need a good coat of primer to check the results.

Underside done as well.

Adding the tail cone. ESCI made a bit of a mess here, the tail cone angle is all wrong leaving a gap between tail cone and rudder. Fixed this by angling the tail cone up.

Filling the resulting gap and adding wedge to rudder to close the remaining gap.

Almost done

Tailplane are at an angle when a/c is on ground so replaced tabs with hinge pins and filled the slots.

Installing the intake splitter plates. Added a small missing piece on the upper side.

More modication of the intakes since they are translated forward when on the ground.

The kit thankfully contains the ECM pods (although of rather suspect shape) but does not provide any guide in mounting them... Figured it out from photos and added mounting pins.

Test 1,2, .. looking good. Thinned the upper wing glove as much as possible to reduce step between wing and fuselage.

Can’t decide yet on swept or spread wings so to keep the options open I fashioned an insert for closing of the wing gap.

Wheel wells masked, ready for painting

First a coat of Tamiya primer to check all the filling and sanding work. Looking good. Using a Sharpie to quickly “paint” the canopy frames black was not a good plan. It’s bleeding through...

Started with the black undersurface and pre-shading of the upper surfaces. Using Vallejo Air which takes some getting used to. Once I had the thinning right it worked nicely.

Masking..

Tan color done and more masking. This Vallejo air dries amazingly fast, you can almost start masking right after a paint session.

Light green done and ready for the dark green. I almost forgot the black leading edge panels and

And all colors are on. There is not as much difference between the greens as with the MM range I used before, you can hardly tell light from dark green. Hmmm.

Some retouching of the camouflage and white on gear parts etc

Assembling the jet exhausts. Fit is again not that great.

A coat of Future-ish stuff and ready for decals. And all that in a week! Feels like lightspeed to me 🙂

Decal almost complete, except for long panel on fin. Found out too late that the tail code font is wrong and the long antenna panel on the fin has a different color.

Creating the fin panel with decal sheet and painting the small stuff

In another case of inattention I discovered rather late that ESCI has not only provided too few but also the wrong pylons. They look Iike FB-111A pylons...

... so now I had to modify them which was luckily easy to do.

After weathering a final coat of Tamiya Flat Clear. In yet another near disaster my can ran out during the session, barely made it...

This kit is really biting me in the final stretch. Removing the masking revealed there had been a tiny seam which the primer had found. Sigh... Careful scraping, sanding and polishing saved the day.

Lining up the pylons. Sure enough a careless drop of glue on a finger found its way to the lower wing...

Final assembly, rushing to the finish line, really in the “let’s get this over with” stage by now.

Attaching ordnance...

... and were done!

I planned to have the canopy open but weaseled out of it, the temporary fit with Clearfix had a very definite feel when I started prying. Visions of more damaged paintwork made me retreat...

Коментари

1 9 September 2018, 10:17

Hans Zwetsloot
Hello, to stop me from going crazy in taming my Monogram B-52 I decided to tackle this little project in parallel. I had been looking for a 1/72 Vietnam War F-111A to add to my collection quite some time and earlier this year spotted an old ESCI kit on the Internet. Since it featured the subjects I was looking for I could not resist. I bought it and decided to start on it immediately.
I was aware it was not the best F-111 around but thought "hey, how hard can it be" now that I know how to deal with B-52's. Well... let's just say I was too optimistic (again... 🙁 ) and this kit has been giving me a hard time.
Conclusion: not the expected easy diversionary build but an OK-ish model, filling a gap in my collection. I did like working with the Vallejo Air range, it's pretty much foolproof although I am not so happy with the dark end result compared to the trusty old Modelmaster range I used before. Will have to figure out a solution for that for the next build...

9 September 2018, 10:32