1/144 Northrop YF-17 'Cobra'

Gallery Article by Hristo Krumov on Oct 27 2015

 

      

It has been some five years since I sent an article on Bulgarian MiG-23 and whole year since I came back to the hobby. I am now heavily into the144th scale after following bloggers from all over the world. Last year I did the Ace Hobby reissue of the Revell F/A-18D and felt like doing F/A-18E. The 'E' came from the F-toys selection, which offered me some nice moments, and left me wanting... a YF-17 'Cobra'. I felt like completing the 'family tree' in 1/144. What are the options to do that? The first thing that sprang to my mind was the Anigrand offering - 1/144 B-54A 'Ultrafortress', which comes with a model of the YF-17. Not really viable option given the fact that seldom do these supplement kits appear on eBay separately from the main kit. In mid July this year, just when I started working on this model, TripleNuts from Japan came up with a 1/144 YF-17 3D print model. I was 'stalking' for photos of it, and it seems I will be writing to Santa on account of it this year. It does come at slightly steep price though, which brings the article to my way of getting the YF-17. Some modelers attempted to remodel 1/144 Revell F/A-18A kit, but finding one was not that easy.

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It turned out that I held the least expected option in my models boxes - Hasegawa 1/160(ish) F/A-18C models from their 'One hour coin series'. I have three of those built five or six years ago and when I posed one of them next to the F/A-18D I saw potential for remodeling. The canopy is located in spot by a pin running down from it, but that did not bother me. The good part is that it did not need any serious remodeling other than tilting the upper end of the windshield frame slightly forward. It just so happened that during these preliminary stages I dropped one and had it slightly broken - GO time for the project! The part aft of the air brake on the fuselage needed some extension. New set of nozzles, intakes and horizontal stabilizers were needed as well. I had scratch built these when I found out that in the process of printing my schematic went a couple of percent bigger, adding 1mm to the scale. 

I was able to fix the horizontal stabilizers, but the rest remained slightly bigger. Anyway, I wanted to see this model come to reality and pushed through. The LERX was reshaped after the one on the prototype and the fins were reshaped. The Pitot was added after sharpening the nose section. Surface detail had to be inscribed as well, since there was almost none. I took the missiles from the Attack Hobby L-39ZA kit.  The LERX slots were a bit of a problem. The kit had these originally, but they were not going through the plastic entirely. Any attempt to open them up would have compromised the LERX integrity, so I cut some black and white decals to place on the lower side and simulate the slots, similar to how the first MiG-29K had their deleted upper intake simulated back in the 80's to minimize the visible difference with the main type. For the painting I went ahead with the light gray - blue camouflage, reserving the the silver and black paint of the first prototype for the TripleNuts kit some day. I ordered 'Stars and bars' decal sheets and USAF style numbers from Mark I Decals, which worked like a charm. The rest of the decals came from the spares. I offer photos of the completed kit, some WIP and alongside the Hornet and Super Hornet. Had much fun working on it and I hope to see a 1/48 kit of this aircraft one day. Hope you enjoyed reading this article! Happy modeling to all and my regards to the ARC! 

Hristo Krumov

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Photos and text © by Hristo Krumov