The kit engines and associated engine bay are designed to be displayed however they don’t have enough details to look convincing (to me at least) so I was going to use the panels over them. The engines click into place with a bit of force however be aware they can be fitted on the wrong side.
The engines appear interchangeable, but if you put them in the wrong side the panels won’t fit.
The fit of the engines into the fuselage was really tight. This may have been a result of me getting something misaligned earlier on. The complicated parts breakdown means that if you get something misaligned earlier there is no forgiveness later on. I ended up shaving the ends of the engines to get them to fit… In hindsight I should have enlarged the mounting hole in the engine bay
The kit provides some PE for the engine exhaust petals which looks reasonably effective when applied.
Some serious clamping was still needed to hold everything together. I used Mr Cement S to secure these joins as it dries very fast but is also very strong. I did still end up with larger than ideal gaps along the top of the engine access doors however.
The intakes are made of two L-shaped pieces with the joins along the lower outer and upper inner corners. The instructions suggest gluing the intakes together then attaching this assembly to the aircraft. Doing this you will end up with a step between intake section and the fuselage as the box formed by the intakes is slightly wider than the fuselage. Removing this step will mean loss of much of the fine detail on the intake.
An alternative method is to attach (temporarily or permanently) the inner piece to the fuselage and then sand the mating surfaces of it and the outer piece to reduce the size of the box so it’s the same size as the fuselage. At this stage I also opened up the cannon barrel vents, albeit at the wrong angle.
One thing I haven’t noticed in any of the reviews is that the kit doesn’t have any intake trunking bar the intakes themselves. Although it is pretty dark in there you can quite clearly see the front of the engine faces so intake blanks would be needed.
The vertical stabiliser is made up of multiple parts which are butt jointed, something that should be unacceptable in a modern kit. To make matters worse the rudder is about 2mm too short and the panel under the radar warning antenna fairing on the right side should only be on the left, not on both sides. I filled the incorrect panel in and the line formed by the kit rudder then scribed another line higher up which is closer to being correct.
I usually leave weapons until last on a build, which means I rush them, or give up and never use them. This time I’ve decided to do them along the way.
I really wanted to use the over wing Sidewinder rails but I also wanted to finish the aircraft in the two-tone wrap around tactical camouflage. Conventional knowledge is that the over wing rails were only fitted to Operation Granby (Desert Pink) and Grey Jaguar GR-3s. However after a search online I found enough images online of camouflaged GR’1’s with over wing rails to satisfy me that they could have been used in a major war conflict post 1991.
Another advantage of using the over wing rails is the wing fences that should be fitted to aircraft without the over wing rails aren’t in the kit, although they were included in the Jaguar A kit.
So onto the rails, as I wasn’t really happy with Kitty Hawk’s representation of what looks like a LAU-7 Sidewinder rail. I found some Hasegawa ones in the junk box, removed the Kitty Hawk part and grafted on the Hasegawa part using pins from brass rod to provide extra security.
The Wingman BL 755 Cluster bombs are on the Airfix racks and associated tandom bomb adaptors. The Kitty Hawk Phimat Chaff/Flare pod on the Airfix Pylon which has the ballast weight (as the kitty Hawk pylon doesn’t) and the Sidewinders are from eduard.
On the real aircraft the wings fit over the fuselage so there is no visible join between them and the fuselage. Unfortunately Kitty Hawk haven’t engineered it this way so there was a gap to be filled but this allowed me to correct some of the panel line errors in the kit. The main one being the shape of the panel at the leading edge wing root. The leading edges of the wing on the kit have a distinct saw-tooth which isn’t on the real aircraft. This was reduced as much as practical with a sanding stick.
I usually only spot prime my models but this one had so much work I decided to prime the whole kit. Black basing was all the rage when I was building this kit so I decided to give it a go. I don’t think I’d bother again, particularly on models with dark schemes as it further darkens the top coat. At this stage I found out that the kit has a recess moulded at the rear of the speed brake that shouldn’t be there. To fix this I used some 0.0015″ card cut to shape and glued in.
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