This is my Pig that took 7 months to me to be finished because of lot of things to do outside modelling (I never took that long to build a model).

This aircraft is a former USAF F-111A used in Viet-nam, it was sold to Australia in 1982 which fitted it to C standard keeping its SEA camo scheme. In the nineties, it got its sadly dark sea grey scheme.

I chose to use practice weapons from an older Hasegawa kit, I don't think that it's an usual ordnance which is depicted here because the AIM-9b was almost never carried by the aircraft, and bombs are missing (didn't have enough of it) on the rear BRU attach points (I beleive this configuration is called « flat four », if I read this well...).

Click on images below to see larger images

It was almost built out of box as I didn't use any aftermarket on it, only some scratch things in the cockpit and the wheel wells, I also made new air intake conducts as there are none in the Hasegawa kit.

The fit around the fuselage was poor, I had to force the kit to take it's shape and mastic were much used. The wings went OK without problem.

I particularly liked the jet exhaust, and painting it was great fun, finding the perfect match was a good time passing job. I used Gunze colors (classical TAC SEA federal standards 30219/34102/34079/17038) adding white at a ratio of 15 % for avoiding the scale effect tone down, I did a very light juice in the panel lines as those aircrafts are always clean.

The decals are the ones from the box. After the application, I forgot to seal them with a glossy varnish and when I put the final satin coat, I saw silvering almost all around the aircraft, the modeller's nightmare.

I had hard times to get rid of it, the classical method (micro needle holes with application of micro sol) didn't work. I had to wipe out the satin coat and do the job again (micro sol application several times, taking care to let dry between applications).

Finally, after having sprayed a new satin coat the problem disappeared, the pictures show it and I think I won't forget this « sealing decals with glossy varnish » step again...

Click on images below to see larger images

To conclude, I'd say that this is not a kit for beginners as everything doesn't get together well on the first time, but I think it's still the best representation of this aircraft in this scale.

This is some links for more information about those RAAF varks :

• http://www.adf-serials.com/3a8.shtml
• http://www.f-111.net/t_no_C.htm
• http://home.att.net/~jbaugher1/f111_5.html

There are plenty of references on the net about this nice aircraft.

Hope you liked mine.

Pierrig

Click on images below to see larger images