1/32 Tamiya F-15E & Ace F-16XL

by Stephen Cornett 

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Well folks most of you know the Tamiya F-15E.  The kit is basically out of the box with the exception of the intake covers and some little extras on the seats.   The decals are from Twobobs.   In my opinion, the Tamiya F-15 kits are probably the overall best 32nd scale models on the market.   They need very few corrections and very little in aftermarket add-ons to make them look good.  They are some of the few kits that can be built out of the box.

With all that being said, I’ve wanted to build an F-16XL for years BUT the XL kits are on the other end of the spectrum.  Meaning they’re just terrible.   After building an Academy F-16, I had a revelation.  

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The Academy kit has a lot of spares.  So, I put them to good use and built what I think is fairly nice model of an XL.  I used an F-16C cockpit set from Blackbox.  The cockpit tub had to be sanded down such that the seat sits on the lower part of the kit.  I used the Large Mouth Intake from the Academy kit.  It fits fairly well but I had to add approx. ½” to extend it back to the wheel wells.  I just cut ½” off the Ace intakes and filled in the gap.  It works out fairly easy.  I used the spare canopy from the academy kit.  Here I had to do some cutting and rework around the back part of the cockpit tub.  The area just behind the front canopy has to be cut to match the Academy parts then boxed in.  That took care of the front of the aircraft.

I tapered the wings back to make them look more accurate.  The front part of the wingroot should sweepback at more of an angle.  I now it’s not exact.  I just got a few pictures of the plane and went off them.

For the tail I went with the GE110 burner can.  The can fits really well.  Just a small bit of sanding once it’s glued in place and your set.  I also adapted the tail extension from the academy kit to replace the on the Ace kit.  And that pretty much took care of the changes to the kit.  I didn’t do any panel line adjusting since I really had no good reference pictures to go off.  So I just went off the kit lines.  The wings fit very badly.  I had to do a lot of trimming and dry fitting to get the wings to fit decent.  And once they were glued I had to do a lot of sanding to get the seams to go away.  This is were the rescribing came in.  After all that, I just added a few thousand rivet holes. 

The targeting and navigation pods, AIM-120s, AIM-9Xs, GBU-16s and GBU-10s all came from the academy kit.

I used .016 lead to scratch build the intake cover and small RBF covers on the seats.

Stephen 

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Photos and text © by Stephen Cornett