1/32 Cutting Edge/Tamiya F-16XL

Gallery Article by Terry Chan on Apr 6 2010

 

This is the infamous Cutting Edge 1/32 F-16XL conversion set for the Tamiya F-16C Thunderbirds kit.  While the set itself has a number of accuracy issues, this article will only discuss my experience from building it.  This was my first conversion project.  To make things even more interesting, I decided to put in a Black Box resin F-16A cockpit set (for the 1/32 Hasegawa F-16) to replace the Tamiya kit's C-model cockpit.
 
The Cutting Edge set included top and bottom fuselage halves, wings, seamless jet intake, vertical stabilizer - basically every major modules on an airframe.  When all was said and done, there wasn't much left that was from Tamiya.  It was mostly a resin model and weigh a lot.
 
The Black Box cockpit tub needed some trimming to fit into the Cutting Edge fuselage.  The side walls needed some trimming too.  Oh and the instrument panel coaming.  Ok so the cockpit didn't fit that well at all, but I managed to get it in.  It's marginally more detailed than the Tamiya cockpit, but the Tamiya version is for the C-model F-16 and wasn't accurate for this build.
 
The landing gears and gear bays were a mix of Tamiya and Cutting Edge parts.  They went together fairly well and presented no dramas.
 
Next up was the jet intakes.  Cutting Edge provided a seamless intake.  Unfortunately the resin has shrunk so much that the intake was essentially un-usable.  I ended up using half a Cutting Edge trunk and half a Tamiya trunk to get my version of a seamless F-16 intake.
 
Gluing the fuselage halves together required 2-part epoxy glue.  I mixed a small batch of glue (the stuff reeks), and clamped the glued parts together and let them sit over night.  The result was a nice sturdy joint.
 
Since the wings are cast in resin and are quite heavy, I needed extra reinforcement.  I drilled small holes on the mating surfaces between the wings and the fuselage, then insert metal pins to add strength.  The pinned wing-root joint was again glued with epoxy glue and left to cure over night.  The 4 resulting gaps (left, right, top, bottom) were long and nasty.  They required multiple layers of super glue and Tamiya putty to be filled.
 
The Tamiya radome was used.  Unfortunately it doesn't line up well with the Cutting Edge nose.  I had to soak the radome in hot water then pressed it to shape.  The re-shaped radome was glued on the nose and again multiple layers of putty was needed to blend things in.
 
The gun port doesn't exist on the NASA version of the XL, so I filled it with plastic stock and blended it in with super glue.  Various antennas specific to the XL were scratch built using plastic sheets.  The Tamiya exhaust was used.  I decided to use the closed version because it hides the exhaust tube seam better.  I know it's not accurate for a powered-down F-16, no emails please.
 
The vertical stabilizer was purely Cutting Edge resin.  There was a gap on the joint with the fuselage, but nowhere near as bad as the wings and radome.  

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I decided to model my XL in the eye-catching NASA scheme. This is my first all black project so I welcomed the challenge. First I sprayed the nose white with Gunze acrylics. Then the yellow stripes with Tamiya acrylics then I masked them with the tape provided by Cutting Edge. The overall black was sprayed with Gunze acrylics "Tire Black". Then various panels and access hatches were painted regular black. To make things less boring, I randomly sprayed white inside the panel lines, then used Tamiya "Smoke" to blend the white splotches into the black. The result is an F-16XL with a tonal variation effect that doesn't look like a big black triangle devoid of any details. I coated the model with Future floor wax then started decaling.

The decals provided by Cutting Edge were pretty good. They're quite thin, in fact, so thin that they were very easy to rip. After another coat of Future later, I gave the model a wash to bring out the panel lines. Obviously a black wash won't work on an all-black model, so I used a wash of grey to get the contrast in the black areas, and regular black wash on the white nose.

I have always liked the F-16XL since I was little. The Cutting Edge conversion is expensive and has accuracy problems (which caused numerous fire storms in Internet forums), but a 1/32 F-16XL model is a must-have for me. This project took me approximately 3 months to finish, and I am quite pleased with the results. I hope you enjoy the pictures too.

Terry Chan

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Photos and text © by Terry Chan