F-4J Phantom II

I picked this rather old 1985 kit for a few reasons:

- I really liked the color scheme,
- It included figures,
- It was easily available.

I had done some research and was aware of some problems.

- Raised panel lines. Had never dealt with these before. Thought: how bad could it be. Turned out: quite bad. Probably the worse part was with sanding, which this kit required quite a bit, but it's really easy to lose these raised details and near impossible to restore them.
- Quite a bit of flash.
- Some fit issues, but nothing major really.

One big bummer turned out to be painting instructions. Both the box and instruction manual contained photos of an assembled model with lots of details. But when I started to investigate the manual more closely, I realized that lots of these details were not included in the painting instructions. It was like the photos were of a 1:48 model while the actual kit was 1:72.

Similarly, several decals one could see on the photos were not present in the kit or were different. For example there was a black instrument-panel decal with white letters on it - the actual decal was just a black rectangle.