1/32 Tamiya F-15J Shiro Ruyu

by Eric Lowe

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Man, this is the second time Dave Cornett got the scoop on me - first with his 1/32 VF-31 Tomcat and now this!  Oh well...  I've always liked the F-15, but I've never really enjoyed building them for whatever reason; however, when I saw the TwoBobs White Dragon decals, I knew then and there that I'd soon have a new one in my collection.  There really isn't a whole lot to say about this build that hasn't been said before, especially if you've read the "how to" page on Masa Narita's website at http://www.naritafamily.com/.  The build is very straight forward and the only after market pieces I used were the Cutting Edge seamless intakes. 

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Long story short, the seamless intakes come in three parts - two gray and one white.  The white piece includes both intakes up to the fan blades as well as the wheel wells, which saves a lot of pains taking cutting and puttying of the original piece.  The gray pieces start from the very front of the air intakes and go in a scale six feet, which are easily painted the fuselage color and glued to the front of the gloss white intakes.  This took a bit of patience and a lot of glue, but it looks great once it's in place.  Awsome!

The only other roadblock that I ran into while building this aircraft was gluing on the wings.  There was quite a gap between the fuselage and the wings and this actually had me go astray for a while and build my first-ever *gasp!* - BATTLESHIP!  After endless nights of fumbling with miles of super-sensitive railing, I happily returned to try to finish this beast before moving into my new house  this Friday - Woohoo!!!=) 

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Anyway, the final pantjob consisted of the usual overall base color, dark-dark gray preshading and camoflage outlining, filling in each panel with the appropriate color, then giving an overall spray of very thinned color, finished up with a gloss overcoat.  The TwoBobs decals went on a lot easier than I had expected for such large pieces - I essentially created a lake of water on top of the aircraft, floated all four pieces of the white dragon into place, dried most of the water, and then drowned them in setting solution (of which you will need a L-O-T.  Finished her off in a dull overcoat.  All in all, this was a great build and I couldn't be happier with the results.  More importantly this got me over my F-15 angst and I'm looking forward to picking up a 1/32 Bunker Buster in the future, but first, I've got a 1/72 Airfix Concorde and 1/32 Trumpeter SU-27 eager to be started in the new house.  Stay tuned!

Eric

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Photos and text © by Eric Lowe