All ‘tooled up’
I’d made the decision early on to lose the stealthy aspect and load up our war bird with a significant load out. For a Royal Navy version this had to be in an anti-shipping role, so let’s roll out some missiles.
My weapons of choice are a pair of AGM84D Harpoon and a pair of the enhanced AGM84E SLAM on the inner and outer wing stations, courtesy of Skunkmodels.
As I am a stickler for stores to be accurate, the Harpoons are finished in gloss white and the SLAM in matt Medium Gray, both depicting ‘live’ war rounds, none of your training stuff here.
The Skunkmodels set are finely detailed, giving the option to build the D or E versions from each sprue. The only modification is to drill out fresh holes to align with the pylon pins.
The only disappointment with the set are the decals, they are truly rubbish, colours all wrong and poorly printed. Time to dig in the spares box again.
The kit supplied a pair of AMRAAM for the internal weapons bays and the AIM-9X Sidewinder for the wing stub pylons are not bad representations at all, although no decals are supplied. There are more of those pesky injection marks to get rid of.
But nothing a little dab of filler can’t fix.
The AMRAAM’s fit evenly onto the internal weapon bay pylons, but ensure you fit the inner bay doors first, to save much fiddling around later.
Wrapping up
I see no point in documenting each and every door that you need to hang, they all locate positively into their respective hinge slots.
The canopy finally fitted, surprisingly it needed some filler but this is more a case of my poor modelling than the fit of the kit parts. That’s it – job done!!