ITALERI 1/72 BAe HAWK MK.100 SERIES TNI-AU Hawk MK 109 Introduction I came across the italeri 1/72 hawk 100 kit in my local shop and was attracted to the clean slick lines. When I turned it over, I made up my mind to finish it in the RAAF Hawk 127 LIF as I liked the colour scheme. What was supposed to be a straight forward OOB affair turned out otherwise. I found out half way through the project that there were inaccuracies to make it into the Hawk 127. Fortunely, a new found friend, Alex Sidharta, whom I met right here at ARC, help provided information for me to change track and finish it into a Indonesia Hawk 109. Construction If you read all the avialable review on this kit (which I did not do in the first place :-p), almost all them will have the word fiddly (or something similiar) featured somewhere in the text to describe it. After having encountering it first hand, they are right most of the time ! However the main gripe I have is not with the parts being small but the fact that the parts either have no proper attachment points or the holes provided is always bigger than the locating pin ! But other then those points, most of the parts do have very nice details on them and not oversized or featureless, something that put me off 1/72 long ago. Incidently this is my first 1/72 kit after my last encounter with them about 5 or 6 years ago that made me stick to 1/48 ! They do have come a long way though. Cockpit One of the weak area of the kit is the cockpit as it is just a random arrangement of dials and squares (as I found out later in my "late" research). They may be inaccurate, but I figure after the painting is done they should look alright and I left it as it is and since its suppose to be a OOB affair, I did not do any major work here other then to add in some random details to the cockpit side walls to make it look more lively. Since the details are raised, some dry-brushing, after the base colour of light gray is applied, brings out the details nicely. I applied a small amount of squadron putty on the top of the seat and scribed out some creases to simulate the chute packing as per the real thing. The seat then gets a base colour of medium grey. After some light wash and painting the various details, dry brush was done to bring out the details. The next step was to install the cockpit tub into the fuselage. Be careful when fixing the back seater bulkhead part 6B on the tub. Make sure you line them up to the fuselage to minimise the gap between it and the fuselage. At this point in the construction, I have managed to find additional reference material on the Hawk. And by this time, the Asian Aerospace 2002 was on and I manage to shoot some detail shots of the Hawk demostrator ZJ100. (I have since send Steve some walk around pictures of the Hawk ZJ100 and the mock up airframe that BAE brought in for the Asian Aerospace 2002 show. I thinks its still on Steve's update queue) Using the shots I have taken in AA2002, I sprue up the cockpit area a bit with bits of plastic and copper wire. Among the things I "simulated" is the HUD repeater for the backseater and the HUD for the front seat using thin copper sheet, styrene, acetate sheet after sanding off the kit provided part. Fuselage The fuselage poses no major problem except that I strengthened the area behind the cockpit using a portion of the tree part. This is to provide a strong and stable mating surface for the engine cowling panel part 20B when installed. Also I tend to hold on to the kit using this part a lot during construction so this gives the additional support needed. After the cowling panel is installed, it leaves a gap that needs to be filled. I left the small parts like the horizontal stab, the smurfs, antennas and the under belly strakes etc off to be installed at a later stage to prevent damage during handling. Wings I next proceeded on to the wings which again poses no major problem in terms of fit. It mated to the fuselage without any fuss. There was a seam line on the wing root where it joined the fuselage. However a quick filling of squadron putty using the no pains, no sandpaper fill-n-wipe method found on ARC Tool's n Tips section ensured a clean putty job at the wing root with the surface details intact. I next proceeded to install and test fit the other bits for the wings like the actuators, landing gears and doors. As I mentioned before, some of the parts does not have proper attachments. The landing gear doors are an example. All they had was tiny tabs that is expected to be used to glue to the main body. So for the main landing gear door, I glued the side doors to the main body and glue the smaller main door to the back of the landing gear instead of the fueslage as instructed in the manual. On the real thing it is hinged to the main body and closes together with the side door when the gear is pulled up. On 1/72 it looks about right. I think if it looks right a foot away, its ok :p To tackle the same problem on the main landing gear doors, I glued a suitably sized bit of square rod to the doors so that I can attach them much later to prevent breaking them off during construction. The square rod also provides a stronger surface that I can glue to the main body. I next turn my attention to the flap actuators. Some slight problem due to the big-hole-small-peg situation. After installing all of them, I filled up the visible sides of the holes using the ARC fill-n-wipe puttying method. The main gears was then test fitted and cleaned up. Plumbing was added using copper wire. It was then stored away for installation later on. The wing fences then went on the wing leading edge as per the instruction after I have sanded them down slightly to scale thickness. At this point the kit looked pretty decent already. But things were not to be. By this time I have done enough reference to deduce that the kit if build OOB was not gonna be a RAAF Hawk 127 without some additional work. Darren Mottram has got a excellent walkaround for the RAAF Hawk 127 LIF at Other then the instructment panels etc, one major error is the base of the tail. The Hawk 127's tail is suppose to look like the MK 50s/60s, with a tapered shape. Another point is with regards to the wing fences. The Hawk 127 has only 4 wing fences( 2 big, 2 small) attached. I was contemplating at this point to either do some major surgery or wing it and hope no one will notice the glaring errors ! :-P At this time Alex came to my rescue. I met Alex Sidharta on ARC while searching for information for the Hawk. He has agreed to help me on the project and provided pictures for the Indonesia Air Force (TNI-AU) Hawk 109. The particular bird hails from sqn 12 based at Pekanbaru, Sumatra. Alex has also provided the camo pattern, squadron and marking information for the TNI-AU. After going thru what Alex have provided, I decided to change track and go for a TNI-AU Hawk. The TNI-AU Hawk 109 uses the RWR/chaff dispenser housing above the brake chute as depicted by the italeria kit. So no changes needed to be made here. However it uses the same 4 fence configuration as the Hawk 127. Fixing the wing fence is pretty straight forward. The 3rd wing fence, starting from the fuselage and the last one nearest the wing tip will be retained. Using a flat nose piler I pulled out the unwanted fences. As I have used Tamiya extra thin cement to tact the fences, they came off easily with some slight pulling and twisting. What was left were some glue marks which were polished out. I also filed down to size the fences near the wing tips as they are suppose to be smaller. canopy After Alex showed me the Hawk MK 53 that he had (Alex's kit was posted on ARC subsequently). I decided to pose my hawk canopy in the open position too. By some insane inspiration, must have been the superglue fumes, I decided that glueing the canopy with white glue is not a safe method to guard against being knocked off during handling or transportation. So I had to dream up this idea about attaching the canopy using some stronger and safer method ! From my references, the Hawk 100 canopy hinges on 3 points for closing and opening and tension is maintained by some kind of leaf spring mechanism along the canopy rail. I marked out the 2 extreme positions of the hinge on the fuselage and route out 2 groove using my motor tool. Next I filled up the groove with milliput. I also embedded 2 small brass rod in order to get a hole that I can insert the canopy pin later on. After the milliput have dried, I made a inverted 'U' shape from brass rod over the holes created earlier. The brass rod used is the same ones used to mold the hole. This will simulate the leaf spring mechanism. Next I turn my attention to the canopy. After marking out the correct position, I cut out 2 small groove on the side of the canopy using my hobby saw. To get the correct thickness I fitted 2 saw blade on the saw. The end result is a groove on the canopy that fits the brass rod nicely. Next I removed the 'left spring' and attach it to the canopy with a tiny drop of superglue along the length of the brass part. When this has dried, what I have is a canopy that has 2 brass pin sticking out by the side so that I can insert them to the cockpit side. This makes the canopy removable during transportation. You should not try this at home folks, unless you are sufficiently intoxicated with superglue fumes and have taken a swipe or two of Mr colour Thinner ! LOL :-P The worst that could happen is the canopy might get cracked or the groove might go too deep and cut thru to the cockpit, needing some major repair. Lucky for me none of that happen to me and you dun even know its there ! Final bits and piceces After the episode with the canopy, I proceeded to the other external bits n pieces. The small fins or 'smurfs' ahead of the horizontal stabs are added. It is on the thick side and the size is out. So I trimmed and sanded it down to scale before attaching it. It has the same problem of big-hole-small-peg but I glue it so that the oversized hole is not visible from the top and fill-n-wipe the resulting gaps on the bottom where it will not be too visible. The belly fins pose a slight problem as it does not have any tab or peg to align for attachment. What it got is just two faint line marking out the correct position on the kit fuselage. So I tact them using a small amount of cement just to get the correct postion, adjusting along the way if necessary. After I'm satisfied with the position, I applied more cement to fix it. To add strength, I added thin pieces of stretched sprue from the parts tree to bud up the joint on both sides of the fin. From the pictures you can see the added thin sprue. While waiting for the other stuff to dry, I made and installed the blanking plates for the FLIR and range finder on the nose using thin sheet copper as depicted by the references I have. I also made the AOA and pitot from stretched styrene and install them on the front fuselage. The missile rail for the wing tips were also attached. Care must be taken to get a good alignment with the centerline of the fuselage. I also decided to discard the provided drop tank to the spares box and arm the underwing pylon with the 2 extra AIM-9 using the extra launchers provided. The other small parts like antennas are also attached at this point. I also went ahead to drill out the end of the AIM-9s to simulate the exhaust. Mask and Paint Masking then starts in preparation for painting. I masked the canopies using thin graphic tape. They are those commonly used for making printed circuit boards or graphic works and is available in various size of from 2 or 3mm. Personally I think the thin graphic tape is the best when masking curves and sharp edges. After masking the edges, I filled in the center portion with liquid mask. This saves time and is very efficient. At this time I attached the front windscreen to the cockpit and masked the cockpit using tamiya tape. After the liquid masking have dried, I primed the whole kit and all the other smaller parts using Gunze Mr surfacer 1000. I left the primer to dry and came back the following weekend to continue with the painting. Having used the washing and other panel lining method, I thought of trying the pre-shading method that I have read about so often on this kit. So I loaded up my airbrush with some dary grey and went ahead with some pre-shading along all the panel lines on the main fuselage, horizontal stabs and the gun pod . I used the pictures and pattern provided by Alex and those found in the April issuse of Scale Aircraft Modelling to finalise the camo pattern. There are some minor variation to the pattern depicted in SAM when compared to the pictures I got. I decided to go with Alex's pictures and pattern. I sprayed the bottom of the kit with FS36622 Light Grey, taking care to not paint out the pre-shaded lines. I found out the best way is to start spraying from the center of panels and work towards the panel lines, then stop spraying when you reach near the panel lines but continue with the motion. The overspray when you stop will blend with the pre-shading nicely to get a taint of darker shade near the panel lines. Use misting at further distance later to blend in lines that are still too dark. The effect is not too obvious from my pictures but trust me its there. The effect is more apparent on the gunpod. The camo colours on the top are FS34079 Forest Green, FS34102 Light Green and FS30219 Tan. The paints I used for paining are Mr Colour lacquer paints that I thin with Mr Colour thinner. To lighten the paint for scale effect I thinned the paints with light grey FS36622 in the ratio of 1:3. The camo pattern were airbrushed on using a aztech A740 with a fine tip from the light to darker colours. During spraying of the camo pattern, I could not maintain the pre-shading effect so all the pre-shading on the panel lines were all covered up. I think the traditional washing and panel-lining method is more suitable for multiple/dark colour patterns and pre-shading has a better result on single colour background. However it may be due to my inexperience with this method, I intend to try it out again in another project. To prepare for decaling, I sprayed on serveral thin layers of Mr Colour clear coat. After that has dried, I enhanced the panel lines using 0.1mm technical pen, wiping off excess using cotton buds. Decal Alex mentioned to me that he used a OOP superscale sheet for the markings on his Hawk MK53. Since I could not get my hands on one, I decided to try my hand at making some custom decals and combining it with the basic stencils provided in the kit to finish the kit in TNI-AU markings. Using all the references for the TNI-AU Hawk, some from Alex, some I found myself, I made the national logo, A/C numbers, TNI-AU lettering and squadron marking etc using a graphics program. Since most of the items are in black, I printed them out on a laser printer using laser decal paper. And since I dun have access to a inkjet printer, for those markings that needed colours, I printed out the design outline using the thinnest line weight and hand painted the colour portion using vallejo colours. What I learn is to get the colour and coverage you want by applying the paint over serveral thin layers in multiple sessions. I sealed the finished decals by misting on several very light coat of future. Application of the decal is straight forward. Some decal needed a dash of set and sol to get it to conform properly. The various decals after application are as shown After the decal has all dried, several thin coat of Humbrol semi-gloss cote was misted on in preparation for some weathering. I used pastel chalk, in various shades of grey, umber and brown for the weathering to enhance the various panel lines and grimy areas like exhaust outlets, wheel bays and the gun pod etc. exhaust2.jpg> After the pastel chalk operation, a final coat of humbrol semi-gloss coat was misted on to seal everything in. Final Touch-up n assembly When the final coat has dried, I removed the masking from the cockpit and touch-up the cockpit sills, canopy etc with paint brush. The 2 underwing pylons and the gunpod was also attached at this point with white glue. Final assembly also takes place for the horizontal stabs which was painted as seperate items as well as for the 4 AIM-9s. To complete the model, I proceed to make a display base for it using mounting board. I scribed the tarmac lines using a blunt tool, drybrushed using various shades of black, grey and umber. I also used very thinned dark grey paint to simulate the oil/fuel stains on the tarmac. To break up the monotony colour of greys of the tarmac, I made the grass verge by the edge of the display. The base is then mounted on a wooden base and I made a name plate to complete the whole display. Conclusion This kit has helped me to appreciate the smaller scale kits and put back my confidence in them. Maybe I will try more 1/72 subjects in the future. There are some hits and misses during this project but I have learnt from all of them. I have also learn a trick or two from some of the guys like Alex, over at ARC forum and some of them have given me much help that I needed. A big THANK YOU to all you guys out there !!! :P Jer Wei Below are some more pics of the completed model. Thanks to TJ for additional pics with his D cam.