The Kit: 

This kit represents another 1/72 scale Italeri kit that originally came from ESCI. All in all, it still is the ESCI kit, however Italeri improved the most urging areas:  

• the cockpit now has seats that actually look like seats and not like „L“-shaped pieces of styrene ;-)

• the instrument panels now have engraved details and not only an option for decaling them

• the gear struts now have braking hoses (molded in one piece; very nice!)

There are three sprues for the styrene parts and one for the transparent ones; resulting in about 75 parts all in all.  

The Decals are sharply printed on rather thin carrier film and allow the depiction of three different aircraft, all of them in full metallic scheme:  

• USAF, 353rd TFS, 354th TFW, 1958

• Armee d' air, E.C.3/11 "Jura", Toul Rosieres, 1967

• Royal Danish Airforce, ESK 725, Karup, 1963

Construction:

Construction begins, as with most kits with the cockpit. I airbrushed the whole cockpit tub with flat black and drybrushed the side consoles and instrument panels with white and silver. The seats were painted black as well, but have olive green cushions and red headrests. (I don’t know if this is correct, at least the instructions say so)

I added some lead weight to the nose, put the cockpit in the fuselage and then the halves were glued together. Almost no filling or sanding was needed in this area. The separate piece for the very front of the nose had to be bent to correct shape to fit at all and some sanding was needed as well. After the wings are glued together and the wing-fuselage-seam is eliminated one has to decide which aircraft to build: There are different nozzles and a cranked as well as a straight refuelling probe. I decided to build the French aircraft, so the refuelling probe could be left off completely and the appropriate hole in the lower right wing had to be filled.

Now with the aircraft in one piece I began to think of the paint job. Of course it had to be a metallic-lacquered bird.  

Equipped with advice from several ARC-contributors (thanks again to RJ Tucker for some very good tips regarding metal-finishes!) and other modellers I went to work.

First, the wingtips were painted in a semi-gloss red and masked off; as well as the tail area. I airbrushed all unmasked parts with „aluminium“ metal cote from Humbrol. Now I unmasked the tail area and airbrushed panel after panel with different shades of Testors metalizer. At this stage, proper masking was achieved with Parafilm M. After the tail looked right to me I masked and painted some randomly chosen panels all over the fuselage and wings to further increase the panelling effect.

It was a pretty time consuming and partially nerving process and next time I’ll try out other methods but everything turned out well in the end this time. 

The external stores and other parts such as the airbrake and gear struts were airbrushed and then sealed with „Erdal Glänzer“, the German equivalent to „Future“, as was the whole aircraft after the decals were put on. 

I finished the aircraft by cutting the originally one-pieced canopy apart and gluing it on in the open position.  

I hope you liked the model a little bit. Some things may be incorrect but I tried to achieve the best result I could achieve after only 10 months of scale modelling. (model was built in July 2002)

Feel free to send me an Email if you have questions, remarks...!  

Greetings from Germany