Aircraft Background

Background

Two years ago (or so), a friend of mine, a warrant officer in the same squadron as me, was on the way transferring to an F-16 squadron. He told me he bought a model kit of an F-16 long time ago, and was left unbuilt ever since. Since its my hobby to build models, I offered to help him build up his model into an RSAF viper.

To my horror, he passed me a box of a Tamiya F-16 old tooling kit. The kit has raised panel lines, poorly moulded details and canopy. To make things worse, the kit depicts the FSD jet with the early Block 10 stabilizers. Simply said, it cannot be made into any version of our vipers.

The Tamiya 1/48 F-16 kit can only be built into the early FSD jet.

To build an RSAF viper, I have only 3 blocks to choose from:
- F-16A/B Block 15 OCU
- F-16C/D Block 52
- F-16C/D Block 52+

Block 52+ was out of question not only due to the prohibitive cost, but also the conversion set was out of production and not easily found (even if I find one, I have to pay with my fortune). Block 52 was an option, but I have only the Hasegawa Block 50/52 CJ kit to choose from. The kit was getting rare as the demand for it rose (due to the popularity of the Barak viper) and so did the price. Although half the cost for the 52+, the F-16CJ kit still costs easily 50 SGD (provided I find one). The Block 15 OCU was another problem. Block 15 kits are easily available at friendly price, but our F-16A/B comes with the extended parabrake housing and I need either a Hasegawa kit or get aftermarket resin stuff. None of these were cheap solutions.

The Academy F-16 can be built into a Block 15 F-16A or Block 32 F-16C OOB.

The project was held for some time, until I came across an Italeri F-16B/D Viper kit. It offers the extended parabrake housing part as spare and I knew immediately what to do with it. I grabbed a box of Academy F-16A Thunderbird and the project was ready to go.

The Academy F-16 is easily recognised as a retool of the Hasegawa kit with some changes. The details are just as crisp and nice, with all the accuracies of the Hasegawa kit thus easily making it the second best F-16 kit in the market and 1/3 price of the best. However, second best is second best, and not without buggers.

The cockpit was bare and void of any details. The kit offered decals for the cockpit (very poor decals too…), but its not acceptable in 1/48 models IMO. I used the Italeri cockpit. Its not totally accurate, but recognizable as an F-16A pit and looks nice enough. The fit wasn’t perfect but I am not overly concerned with that.

Cockpit from Italeri kit depicts a fairly accurate A viper.

Tail fin with extended parakbrake housing present in export F-16s.

The tail was from Italeri kit. The extended tail was inaccurate in shape and details. After much filing and breathing in tons of plastic dust and, I reprofiled the tail to look much better and closer to the real thing. RSAF vipers parabrake housings are empty, so I covered the back of the tail with a piece of styrene. Correct panel lines are rescribed.

Coming to the kit itself. The Academy kit comes with a few buggers. One of them is the strakes. The forward strakes are bad looking and needed lots of filing to get it look slightly better. The aft strakes are inaccurate in profile too and way beyond my skills to correct them. Unlike the Hasegawa kit, the upper and lower fuselage pieces join halfway along the side of the strakes leaving a long and terrible seam there which requires puttying and sanding to get it smooth.

The other PITA is the wings, which IMO is the most terrible part of the kit. Lots of attention is needed here or else one will end up with irrecoverable mistakes. The fit was far from good leaving seams all around. The LAU-110s are separate pieces and I heard some say that the angle is wrong.

The kit offers an NSI intake which our RSAF vipers use. The intake, is however, poorly moulded. Its broken down to left and right pieces, and they ain’t even asymmetrical. I used a spare intake from a Hasegawa kit.

Other than the pitfalls mentioned above, the rest of the build was straightforward. I cut the flaperons to drop them, and worked on the hotstabs to pose them angled.

Painting the exhaust took lots of careful masking, and even more swearing...

Fortunately RSAF uses the P&W F-100 nozzles, as it’s the only one offered in the kit. The nozzles was painted with enamel titanium silver, gun metal for the petals and weathered with smoke. The jet blast mark was drawn with cotton buds dipped in black.

I used lacquer paint for the body in the usual F-16 three tone scheme FS36118, 36270 and 36375. The nose color was a result of some mixing. I did not use any form of weathering except enamel wash on the landing gears and wheels.

Ready to paint!

The kit offered 4 AIM-9s, which two was painted as CATM-9 on Stn 1 and 9. The other two had their front fin removed and rear fin sanded to represent the ACMI on Stn 8 and the AMA on Stn 2. This configuration is fictional as it never happened on out F-16As (although these are present on our inventory). The 370 gallon tanks are kit stuff and the 300 gallon centreline is from Hasegawa. I wanted to add AGM-65 Mavericks on Stn 3 and 7, but dropped the idea last minute.

The seat was a !@#$% bitch to work on!!

The ACES II seat offered in the kit is acceptable, but a bitch to get it fit into the Italeri cockpit. I had to cut and sand chunks of plastics off to (barely) get it fit in.

The canopy is of wrong profile, thus making it tough to fit in. The real canopy has a bubble shape cross section to make it more resistant to bird strikes. I used some styrene to have it attached to the cockpit and it will sit there for good.

The static dischargers are made from nylon, so are the AOA probes, which for some weird reason absent from all F-16 kits.

Decals by SiamScale

The decal was from SiamScale. The decals are nicely done and detailed. Almost every stencil on the aircraft is on the sheet. Who would have guessed such a small aircraft could have almost a hundred decals to apply on?! Decalling took me two nights. On the minus side, the decals are very thick and required a lot of treatment to get it down. I had to struggle between the early RSAF markings with the 'taiji' emblem or the late markings with the merlion head emblem. I wanted to do the early markings, but I decided that using those markings while putting CATM-9s, ACMI and AMA on is stupid, so I had to settle with the boring markings. The whole model was given a flat coat after that and it’s ready for the roll-out.

Tools for decalling