1/72 Italeri British Aerospace Hawk T.1A

1/48 Hasegawa F-86F 'RSAF'

Gallery Article by Mike Grant

 

This model was inspired by an article in the September 1999 issue of 'Scale Aircraft Modelling', and by a long-time admiration of the Hawk since seeing (and hearing!) them do low passes through the Welsh valleys.  The model is built from the Italeri kit, and in retrospect I think I should have based it on the Airfix version!  It's not that Italeri's is bad, but it seems a little under-scale, and the fit of parts is awful, particularly the wings-to-fuselage and the air intakes.  The plastic is Italeri's usual soft grey with somewhat indistinct panel lines, and the canopy needs the really heavy Miniature Detonating Cord removing.  As moulded, it would scale up thicker than a ship's hawser!  On the positive side the kit has the basis of a reasonable cockpit interior which I added to with an Airwaves etched set, and the wheels are nicely represented.

I wanted to do an all-black scheme and chose one from the 'SAM' article with an eye-catching tiger head motif on the tail.  I used gloss black acrylic and a few coats of Future, but when I came to mask off the wheel wells the masking tape removed a HUGE chunk of the black paint.  Vowing to use enamels from now on I re-masked and resprayed...  I created the tiger image and all the codes on my Mac and printed them onto decal paper with an ALPs printer, enabling me to print the white details.  The stencilling came from an Xtradecal sheet, as did the RAF roundels.  As a final touch I added the FOD covers on the intakes (saves having to paint the insides!) and RBF tags which again I printed on the ALPs.

 

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Hasegawa 1/48 F-86F

I bought this kit from a guy in Montreal for $18.00, and was so impressed with the detail that I delayed starting it for over a year in case I spoilt it! When I did make a start I decided to do a straight out-of-the-box build, adding only harnesses from Tamiya masking tape and etched buckles from Eduard. I also removed the seam line on the canopy, necessitated by the blown cross-section.

I had some decals from Cutting Edge which included this Saudi AF machine, the notes emphasised the faded state of this particular plane so I set out to weather it. I tried a technique which I'd read about in Tamiya Magazine in which panel lines and recesses are sprayed black first, and then the camouflage colours are built up gradually, allowing the shading to show through. It was pretty scary at first, after the first couple of light coats it looked hideous, but gradually it began to look OK, especially after I'd run blue-grey watercolour into all the panel lines. After I put the decals on the green of the national markings looked far too strong so I sprayed (yet another) coat of the grey over them to tone everything down. I sealed everything in with a matt varnish.

Mike Grant

      

Photos and text © by Mike Grant