Here is my effort of 23 years ago, when all I had were the box photos to go by for painting and decal location.  There are lots of errors and I hadn’t even heard of modeling putty back then, much less used any.  Still it’s an attractive jet….

Now my latest iteration of this very same kit, utilizing many of the building and painting techniques that I’ve found here….

The biggest difference is the engine nozzles.  The old kit has nozzles with turkey feathers, whereas modern American F-15’s do not, so I bought a corrected resin set from Cutting Edge and then deleted the tail hook faring.  This old kit is missing other stuff as well, like drop fuel tanks and modern weapons.  New WRM 610 gal. resin drop fuel tanks were also bought from Cutting Edge and I raided an Academy F-18C kit for 2 AIM-120 AMRAAM missiles, 2 GBU-10 laser guided bombs and 1 GBU-24 laser guided bomb.

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The Lantirn Navigation and Targeting pods are also missing, so thankfully a set was available from Flightpath Gunsmoke Range to make this F-15E more accurate, especially with laser-guided bombs.  Unfortunately these pods do not come with mounting pylons, so I scratch made a set from pylons from another kit. 

A new (to me) painting technique that I’ve found here is weathering, which I think makes the aircraft look much more realistic, so I applied the popular artist oil wash after a couple of coats of Future.  Future also brought out the clarity of the canopy, which was sanded to remove the center line.  Final decaling was done with the Twobobs “Saddam Hunters” decal scheme, which goes with the WRM drop tanks used in the Iraq war in 2003.

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There are still lots of errors, but I hope you like the improvements that I’ve made to a 25 year old Revell kit after being away from the hobby for so long.  My next project is the Tamiya 1/32 F-14A “Black Knights” kit, but I’ve already purchased the very popular Tamiya F-15E “Bunker Buster” kit for a future build.  It’ll be interesting to see how well these much more expensive but nicer kits go together.

Chuck