Hasegawa F-4EJ Phantom, Goodbye Okinawa 1:48

This is my 2nd Hasegawa F-4 and again I’ve used the SAC undercarriage. Not because the detail is better than the kit legs, because it’s not, it’s worse in fact, but the white metal ones are stronger. The kit is quite heavy when finished and I’ve seen a few that have bowed over the years. The wheels are from Royale Resin, IMHO still the best aftermarket F-4 wheels. I’ve added the bits from the Eduard PE set.

I’ve also had to scratch build the wing tips. I really should have used the proper F-4EJ Kai kit as a base for this build as it has different wing and fuselage sprues (Although they are the same letter) . This isn’t my best effort but it’ll be good enough.

I started with the NATO Black for the thin black line and then masked it out with thin tape. Next was the lime green, Tamiya X-15. I masked it all out then pondered the greys.
The instructions have FS36320 for the dark grey (upper surfaces) and FS36375 (lower lighter surfaces).
But a lot of the images I have appear to show much lighter greys than those two, that said there are images that show darker colours.

After making some paper masks for the tops of the wings, I tried FS 26440, a light grey used on the JASDF F-1, but it looked too light. So after much thought, and looking through images I used Mr Color FS 36375 (308) as the base coat and mixed up lighter and darker shades of this. It’s still not quite right but it will do. This build wasn’t supposed to be anything more than a bit of fun with a colourful subject so I’ve decided to go with this and move on.

I sprayed the light grey first, then the dark grey mixtures. I used my 0.2mm Sparmax airbrush to freehand all the light patches on the fuselage using photos as references. I did go back and forth multiple times until I was happy. In the end I loaded my usual 0.3mm Sparmax with the one colour and the 0.2mm with the other and chopped and changed until I was happy.

Pulling of the masking I realised that the Light Green is not a colour that dries quickly (or it remains soft for ages, something I’ve seen from time to time with other Tamiya gloss colours) as the masking tape had marked the finish. I’m going to have to sand of the marks and repaint it last.

Paints done/ Mr Color for the greys Tamiya for the green and black and Alclad2 over AS 11 for the metal.
The green was awful to paint, didn’t cover well and took ages to dry. Many touch ups were required.

Seats, I always leave these until late in the build for some reason. These are the Quickboost seats which are excellent both in value and detail.

Gloss coat

I’m trying to use up old gloss coats I’ve bought and tried. This is Gaianotes. It’s a Japanese Lacquer and I really like it as it dries very fast (I can decal over it in about 20 mins) But it’s “hot” and I often get paint that is underneath bleed though. The green has bled through in places on this one which I’ve had to over coat again.

And back to the green paint. The aircraft has some text printed in green. On the decal sheet it looks a fair bit different in shade from the green I’ve used. It looks closer to the Humbrol green (38 lime green?). Some of the colours of the artwork on the sheet doesn’t look like that on the photos either.

Fun with decals

The main markings are from the Model Alliance sheet. They are printed by Catrograf so they went down well.
However it seems the people you did the artwork clearly didn’t look at the aircraft in question. The background on the surfer on the splitter panes has a dark blue background on all the images I have, not light blue and purple. Plus the light green in the text doesn’t resemble the green they suggested for the tail, spine and nose. I’m just going to live with it and move on.

The stencils are from the Hasegawa kit. These are pretty close to the aircraft in question, so far I’ve only seen a couple of minor differences and I’m going to live with these. Hasegawa give you a lot of the individual stencils on 1 large decal but I’m cutting each one out and applying them individually. This is taking a long time. I’ve spent about 3 hours on this so far.

These decals are going down ok. But on most I’ve been putting a drop of floor polish under the decal then after positioning it, using a cotton bud to squeeze out the excess. Hopefully this will reduce the amount of silvering.
Where I haven’t used floor polish under the decal I used a really hot cloth to press down on the decal.

I really like really hot water for decaling, especially for Hasegawa decals. I got sick of constantly emptying and topping up a container with hot water so I picked this up, a glue pot ($10 at the local art store). This keeps the water just below boiling. This has been working really well, although I did put a inline switch so I can easily switch it off if need be

Sealing gloss coat.

Really happy with the way the decals turned out.

For the stencils I applied a little bit of Future (Pledge One Go actually ) and then laid the decal in that. Once I was happy I used a cotton bud to press out the excess. The times I needed to reposition a decal I just applied more future until the decal unstuck then repositioned it and tapped out the excess.

There appears to be no silvering

For the flat coat I’ve used Winsor and Newton Galeria Matt Varnish. 2 thin coats and a dead flat finish. I do occasionally get white spec’s so I don’t use this that often but in this instance it worked well, a nice flat finish.

Hasegawa put many stencils on one large decal. But apart from the ones on the bottom around the centre of the aircraft, I cut them into smaller individual pieces. I’d guess it took about 12 hrs to do the lot. I did apply 2 large decals to the bottom that had a large number of stencils as I’d had enough by then. They worked well so I guess I could have done the same on the top.

Some light weathering using oils, enamel washes and pastels

The Aires exhausts have great detail but, as usual they needed some sanding to make them fit.
Here are the exhausts without any sanding

Some adjustments.

Not perfect but better.

And that’s the build finished. I’m really happy how it turned out. (GC: You should be Calum – it’s stunning!)

Calum G.

Gallery

Below are a series of images of the completed model. Click on a thumbnail to see the enlarged image.

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