Black Box

1/48 F-104 G/J Starfighter cockpit set

Product # 48006 for Hasegawa kit

Product Article by Steve Bamford

 

 

 

This is the new 1/48 F-104 G/J cockpit set with masters created by Jef Verswijvel himself.   Jef has clearly demonstrated with this cockpit set that he knows how to create detail in resin sets, but of course....Jef is not new to resin sets.  

This 32 piece resin set has many firsts for Black Box........including underwing fuel tanks, 2 different versions of ejection seats and a seated pilot figure.  These parts are a decent  improvement over the Hasegawa parts, which is saying something, because the Hasegawa kit is new tooling and of very high quality.  The Hasegawa F-104J parts like the ejection seat just can't hope to compare to the detail intensive ejection seats in the Black Box set.  And this set includes 2 different versions of ejection seats to cover German F-104G's and Italian F-104S's and these seats.   

Go ahead....try and make detail like this yourself.  :-)

The cockpit tub has more detail than the kit parts and the detail on the tub back wall behind the seat is much improved on this set.  As nice as the kit instrument panel is...the instrument panel in this set is much more 3 dimensional in nature and detail rich....you have to see the detail to believe it (as can be seen from the photo below).  Both seats fit well in the cockpit tub and the instrument panel is identical in size to the kit part, so fit should be perfect.  The seated pilot figure is an excellent figure, but it would just be too nice of a figure to use over the lovely Black Box ejection seats, but I'm sure these pilot figures will find a home in other projects where regular kit seats are used.  The tub is a nice fit in the kit, but you will be required to sand the bottom of the cockpit tub to get the proper fit....but all this is detailed in the instruction sheet.  The large instruction sheet covers the complete assembly including basic painting instructions for the seat.  All in all a very well done set with good fit qualities.  Further detail photos of the F-104 cockpit and seat can be found in the ARC walkaround section.

Steve Bamford

MB I-Q 7 Ejection seat as used by German F-104G's and Italian F-104S's

 

C-2 Ejection seat

 

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Pilot figure

cockpit tub

control stick

Fuel tank fins

side walls

 

Photos and text © by Steve Bamford