The Kit This is Academy EF-111 kit built straight out of the box. I was considering a resin cockpit, but when I noticed that the cost of the cockpit would be almost as much as the kit, I changed my mind. I thought the cockpit tub looked fairly nice with raised instrument detail. As you can see in the picture, I didn't really follow any strict color guidelines, (mainly red, yellow, black, green, and dark ghost gray.) but I thought it looked cool. I painted the seats red and painted the raised seatbelts black and silver. The whole fit of the parts wasn't too bad, and the fit of the cockpit assembly into the fuselage was solid. I then grabbed two figures and painted them up (with some help from the ARC Discussion board). The fit of the main fuselage parts was decent but required some sanding and filling, but that's pretty standard. I tried the filling and sanding without sanding process, (As seen in the Tools N' Tips section) and it worked nicely. There is a bit of a step that results when you mate the nose subassembly to the main fuselage subassembly.

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    A nice feature was the optional position wings. Unfortunately the variable geometry wings come at a price, that can be kind of an eyesore when the wings are fully opened. There is a plate, which is inserted into the fuselage, which has the engine fan blades stamped onto its surface. This plate is the partially visible eyesore that I mentioned earlier, but there wasn't anything I could do without affecting the wing mechanism.

The instructions, in my opinion, were a bit vague in places. There were two sections especially though, that I had quite a time with. In step three, you assemble the main landing gear assembly and you are told to install what looks like a landing gear door off of the back of the assembly. This sounds fine, right? Then in step eighteen you are told to install another landing gear door in the same location as the one you previously installed. After quite some time on the ARC discussion board, I learned that the door you install in step three is for an older version of the F-111, and the second door is for an newer version. Unfortunately, I learned all of this after I had installed the old version gear door. It was ok, (To be honest, I liked the older door better).

The next thing I had to work on was the ECM "Canoe" under the mid-fuselage. It was a bit of a pip to get installed, due to the fact that it needs some surgery if you want to display the plane with the gear down. First the forward tip needs to be removed, cut in half, sanded and then installed onto the nose landing gear doors. The canoe then needed to be capped off and filled in. I cut a piece of thin cardboard to the shape of the front of the pod and glued it in place. Once it dried, I covered the front of the pod with putty and glued the whole thing to the fuselage. If I hadn't done any of this, the ECM pod would have looked like a big open scoop on the bottom of the plane.

 The whole thing wasn't too bad though. Being out of school, I had A LOT of time to work on this project, resulting in a box to paint ready time of about three or four days.  

Painting and decalling.

            I used Modelmaster Acryl Dark Ghost Gray and Light Gray as the two primary colors on the fuselage. Painting started with spraying the landing gear wells, doors, and struts gloss white. Then the bottom and parts of the top fuselage were sprayed with light gray.

While the undersides dried, I started to paint the canopy (which had previously been dipped in Future.) dark ghost gray. I used a very sticky and sharp general masking tape around the canopy frames which after a couple of tries turned out all right. Recently I picked up my first bottle of Bare Metal's plastic polish, and I'm glad that I did. I must have polished the canopy five or six times inside and out, until it was so clear tat I could see that teeny tiny rip that the pilot had in his jumpsuit. Well not really, but you get the idea.

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       Now it was time to paint the upper surfaces dark ghost gray. It all went over without too many hassles.

 After the paint dried, I gave the model an overcoat of Glosscoate to help with the decalling process. Did this thing ever have decals…Whew! I used Testors decal set to help snuggle them down, and then sprayed the model with Dullcoat.  

Fine Detailing

            This time I tried something new, static dischargers on the tail surfaces.. I made them out of ten-millimeter lengths of stretched spruce, dipped in CA to get that ball effect on their tips.

 Conclusion

            All in all, I think Academy did a bang up job on their EF-111. I've seen the exact Zhengdefu lookalike, and I don't know if it builds up the same way, maybe someday I'll have to try it…. Thank you for reading my first ARC Gallery Article, and listening to how I built my Spark Vark. If you have any questions or comments please e-mail me or catch me on the discussion board, where I'm Brady….the friendly advice guy.

Happy Modeling,

Brady