The landing gears are also assembled and dry fitted to the bays prior to ensure proper assembly.
The placement of the gear cover isn’t very clear on the instructions - so this is how it fits for anyone building this in the future.
I can’t brush paint worth a damn, so I just used some Tamiya masking tape as the yellow strips. Maybe I should have painted that yellow prior to sticking them on to make them pop…
The kit comes in two fuselage halves that run along natural seam lines - very nice!
But there are clearly mould injection marks that need to be sanded down - not so nice. ?♀️
The reinforcement rods are great - but not Bandai Foolproof. You will need to use slower drying glue and perform proper test fitting between the halves to make sure they are aligned properly.
Decals are provided for the meshing within the Raptor’s air-intakes, but if you look at this photo, it isn’t as well pronounced as the dark decals provided.
I lightly coated the decals to make them blend in more to match the real world photos..
The air intakes didn’t sit right - so that would be addressed later with more putty and sanding
The Eduard PE set requires small 1mm frets to be attached to the canopy runner. After wasting an hour trying to get these fitted with CA glue, I just scrapped this piece altogether. Note to Eduard, expecting people to glue ridiculously small pieces in a vertical manner isn’t that easy
I wanted the ram panels to pop out a bit more - hence the traditional light priming with pre-shades. The mottling had a mix of black and blues. I kept the mottling restrained as I wanted to keep the layers nice and thin.
There are two ways to get the Raptor’s silver gray sheen.
1) Paint it all with clear aluminum and then lightly coat it with aggressor gray or
2) Cteate a mix of 1:1 have glass grey with polished aluminum - thinned down with a 2:1 ratio of Mr. Leveler. I went with option #2
Hasegawa gives you the scaling in which you can blow the picture up to create masking templates. Loosely taping it to the fuselage will give you that nice feathered look.
In retrospect, I should have painted the leading and trailing edged FIRST and then masked them prior to painting the main fuselage. It would have been 3X faster. Oops.
The nozzle coloring is all over the place - so I just settled with this instead -I wanted my Raptor to look somewhat newer so I left the panel above the engine burnt vs burnt + reddish rust
There are many F-22 kits out there, but only one worthy of this awesome jet - Hasegawa's 1/48th scale F-22A. this kit languished on my shelf not out of lack of love, but fear that I wouldn't do it justice.
Now that I have figured out how to replicate the Have Glass gray ('which also opens up the HAF F-16 for me), and my airbrushing skills have progressed beyond the monkey throwing paint phase, I present to you the HAS F-22!