F-4J B.N. 155896 VX-4 Evaluators 1:48 Academy

[TheWeasel]

Howdy folks!

Since I just can't stop building Phantoms, I might as well enter this here GB as well... still need a Navy Spook for my "a dozen rhinos" project...

After four Hasegawa kits, I'm returning to Academy for this "short-nose" as they're just so wonderfully detailed!


The kit

Academy offers three different F-4s at the moment:

-F-4B in Sundowners colors
-F-4J in Jolly Rogers colors
-F-4C in USAF SEA scheme

A little fact about the F-4s: The Army decided to have bigger main landing gear wheels on their Phantoms, which led to the C, D, E, RF-4C and G variants to have a distinctive "bulged" upper wing. A feature not to be found on Navy -B Phantoms (and the -N version, which was a -B upgrade). As soon as the -J came around however, the wings also incorporated the bulge for the thicker wheels. For some reason though, the -J kit seems to be between 10 and 20 bucks more expensive...

Having built an Academy/Eduard F-4B for the Vietnam GB, I noticed that the Academy kit is highly modular, giving you lots of different options for minute details in Tails, Radar Warning Receivers, etc etc. In combination with the fact that F-4C/D and -J are very similar to begin with and the price difference between -C and -J kits, I started looking around for the kits manuals online. And in fact the C kit differs from the -J kit in only three things:

- decals
- instrument panel sprues N and M (in the C kit) versus L sprue in the J kit
- the inner wing pylons on separate sprues (Navy vs USAF style)

Luckily, the -B kit from the Eduard good morning da Nang comes with the L- instrument panel sprue. And since I've built a -B variant, the -J panels are still there. So no reason not to weasel out of paying more for a -J kit if I can built the -C as one!


le box


loooots of plastic


the -J instrument panels I still had lying around

I wanted to build this kit OOB, but due to a mishap on my part, I ordered resin wheel wells for Academy kits when I wanted the ones for Hasegawa kits.. guess I'll use them on this build then!



next post will be about the aircraft I want to build

[TheWeasel]

The aircraft I want to build

So now that I've gotten myself the kit.. which aircraft do I want to depict with it? My long term goal is to have a dozen Phatoms from all kinds of operators. The US Navy included. But since the light gull grey over white scheme most navy aircraft were wearing will already be represented on two other Phantoms, I was looking for something more unique. That's when I came across this picture:


four VX-4 Phantoms in Formation over Naval Missile Center China Lake, 1975

This squad seems to be having fun with their paint! I liked the Nr 6 best and decided to build it. A little more research brought up, that VX-4, "The Evaluators" had one critical mission:
Testing equipment currently in use in the fleet or about to be issued to units for the strain regular naval service puts on it as well as developing tactics for and against new weapon systems hitting the field. Especially new missiles and tactics for their use and evasion were developed by VX-4. They flew everything the Navy had at any given time, but the Phantom served with them the longest. From the 60s to 1990, VX-4 was always flying F-4s.

The particular marking of Nr 6 was worn by at least three F-4s (all of them -Js):

B.N. 153086 - which was given to the Blue Angels in '71 and crashed in '72
B.N. 155896 - which took over from 3086 in '72 and served the Marines after it's spin in VX-4, was upgraded to an F-4S and eventually ended at a boneyard in Arizona
B.N. 153795 - which was assigned to VX-4 in '76 and later went on to sail with the Royal Navy

Since the picture was taken in 1975, the most likely Bureau Number for this particular plane is 155896, by which I'll go.

What is that you say? All text and no pictures make Jack a dull boy? Alright.. here ya go:


nice view of the extraordinary paint scheme that reminds of TopGun adversary schemes


probably the fastest mint on the planet


WingsPalette drawing of the scheme I'll depict

Without a lot of aftermarket parts that really slowed me down on the Vietnam Phantom, I expect this to run almost smoothly. I'm sure I'll enjoy building this fantastic Academy kit and hope I'll manage to do the minty blue paintjob justice and entertain you lot

[Nige201980]

Really looking forward to this one





Get cracking then!!!

[TheWeasel]

Really looking forward to this one

Get cracking then!!!

As you wish!

Building the cockpit

Since I'm building a -J out of a -C, the first thing to do is to get the right set of instructions so I know which pieces to use. Luckily, they were available as .jpgs on 1999.co.jp. Going over them next to the -C instructions that came with the kit, there's only a few minor differences. Most of those in the cockpit:



The -C cockpit does not have the right side wall in the WSOs position for example (Piece G12).

So I looked for all the pieces I'll need and prepared them with primer. And since I already got started on priming, I also gave the wheelwells a coat or two:



Speaking of wheelwells, using the resin means that you have to sand away the detail on the bottom of the cockpit tub, which would usually be the inside of the front wheel well. Both styrene and resin need to be sanded down quite a bit to make them fit flush and later into the front fuselage.


detail removed


one of many dry-fits between wheelwell and cockpit tub

Another necessary modification is to trim the firewalls slightly to accommodate the refueling-probe-bulge



After that, it's on to painting the instrument panels. First they were airbrushed in FS 36231 (Gunze H317), then brushpainted carefully with black. For white, red, gray highlights I used a toothpick and a sewing needle tipped in paint.



Everything put into the tub looks like it's going into the right direction already:



Don't forget dryfitting to get the angle on the WSOs sidewall correct:



The cockpit is decent enough in terms of detail and accuracy. One major difference to pictures of real cockpits is the radar scope control in the rear cockpit. I was however not sure how to realize a major modification like that with reasonable effort and decided to just touch up the cockpit with some missing controls.

Academys kit doesn't come with thrust levers. My solution: a strip of 0.25mm thick styrene, bent with tweezers to have a little step



Add some fresh cut disks of 1mm styrene rod



and finally superglue them into place in the cockpit (i chose not to use hot glue, fearing it might eat the thin styrene)



For the joystick controlling the WSOs radar score, I used a piece of 1mm rod and a short piece of very thin stretched sprue (left over from pulling out some antennas sometime)



Everything painted, glued into place, drybrushed with MrMetal buffable Stainless and a little Tamiya X-22 clear over radar scopes and some dials:



There has since been a little more progress with the resin wheel wells and the finishing touches to the cockpit, but I'll save those for the next update.

Thanks for reading/looking through it and happy modeling!

[TheWeasel]

Wheels, intakes, engines, wings and fuselage

With the cockpit completely built up, it received a quick grey wash. Calling it done for now. Seats will only be built and installed later though.



Next up is the preparation of the wings and wheelwells to put everything together eventually. First a couple of holes need to be drilled into the lower wing to prepare for the pylons and some other bits and bobs that will be attached later:



After that it's on to the wheel wells. The kit ones come in four pieces that build up to a frame around the well with the inside of the upper wing piece being the "roof". Since I'm using the resin wheel wells I had lying around, I had to instead install single pieces. They fit almost nicely. they just seem a little too wide to slide into the recesses in the lower wing. The sides (in red) had to be sanded down a little, but then they fit nicely and securely:



I also rounded of the upper edges to make the wing pieces fit over them more smoothly. Once those fit nicely, they were glued and held in place for a while:



Once those were solid, the instructions ask you to install air intakes and burner cans. I've build an eduard good morning da nang kit last year, which includes pretty much the same plastic - all grey as usual. This time though, the kit has some grey, some black and some white plastic parts.
The intakes, that are supposed to be white already come in white plastic:



I don't usually do this, so I guess curiosity as to it's feasibility was a reason to try it...but that's how I left them. I'm not sure how visible the color difference will be between these intake parts and the forward parts that I'll airbrush in white, but given the fact that they're rather far into the fuselage, I think I can get away with it

With intakes and burner cans in place, things are taking shape. When using the resin wheel wells, the wells stand into the middle of the fuselage a little as marked in red. This is quite a bit more than the kit parts would. So the indentation in the fuselage piece has to be widened to accommodate the difference.



Unlike the instructions, I glued the top fuselage in before putting in the lower front, which I think is easier to align things. The cockpit/front wheel well contact needs a lot of sanding and dryfitting to make the gap between lower and upper front fuselage disappear. All in all not too complicated though.

To attach the front lower fuselage, I enlisted the help of rubber bands to keep things in place. The toothpicks keep the rubber bands away from the seamline, so that the extra thin glue can't creep up the rubber band when glueing with all it's capillary action



To glue fuselage to the upper wings, a piece of masking tape helps pushing things together:



The three-piece tail assembly is straight forward and without problems:



To end this update, I leave you with the current build state with wing extensions and nose glued on already. There's only a few places that are going to need filling and sanding so far and the remembering last years academy phantom, the rest of the build shouldn't cause too many problems.. until we get to the neverending decaling phase.....



Thanks for looking and happy modeling

[JediBoer]

Love what you did with the cockpit! Great work mate and an awesome subject!

[Nige201980]

Loving the work your doing mate.

[TheWeasel]

Love what you did with the cockpit! Great work mate and an awesome subject!

Thank you sir! Phantoms are always an awesome subject

Loving the work your doing mate.

Thank you! How's that bicentennial of yours coming along?


Just noticed that I never linked to the picture I promised at the end of the last update... it's fixed now

[Nige201980]

Loving the work your doing mate.

Thank you! How's that bicentennial of yours coming along

Slow mate taking my time with it's going to be a long term build at the mo.

[TheWeasel]

Spicing up the cockpit and building pilots

After almost finishing the fuselage I just couldn't get myself to set up my airbrush things to prepare the air intakes, and decided to procrastinate by giving the cockpit a closer look....

Compared to an Aires resin cockpit I built for an -E Variant, the academy interpretation seems a bit lacking



Especially the cables and plugs etc coming out of the WSOs instrument panel are an eyecatcher, so I tried to recreate this wiring mess for my -J as well. First step: cutting some styrene rod for plugs:



Glueing them in place:



I tried to cut them as long as they were on the aires cockpit. After putting themin place I thought they were too long, but I'm glad I didn't cut them any shorter as in the end it works out very well.

To replicate the cables, I used 0.2mm lead wire.



Much nicer to bend around than copper of the same strength. Although this softness can be tricky when the wire bends anywhere but where you want it to.



All wires in place plus some styrene to give the cables a place to end into where they are not hidden by the ejector seat. The cable in the middle of the instrument panel is just twirled up 0.2 lead wire, running into a thin styrene sheet to cover the hole in the upmost part of the panel.

Painted black, drybrushed with MrMetal Stainless and given a very light gray wash it looks better than I expected




The thing I dislike the most about the Academy kits is the ejector seats. Compared to Hasegawa or resin seats from eduard, aires, quickboost and the likes, I think they are the ugliest.



Left to right: Academy - Hasegawa (from 80s molds!) - Aires - Quickboost

So to hide one of these, I decided to put the WSO into the plane, with the pilot getting ready to board - for a nice static display.
The kit comes with three pilot figures. Two sitting and one standing. There is two variants of heads for the sitting ones - one with visor closed and mask on, the other with visor up and no mask. The visor up variant has the knob that moves the visor in the down position though... something to change when using that one.
The standing one has a haircut against all regulations though:


Captain J. Pomp, callsign "greaseball", US Hair-Force

Not to bore you with the details of painting them, here he is with his hair hidden under his helmet (cut off and replaced the head):




The inspiration for the helmets was a picture of a VX-4 helmet I found online. It's not exactly accurate as it's from a tomcat crew of 1979, but I really liked the design and just assumed the crews of 1975 might have had the same idea already:



Here's the WSO in place with helmet painted and face moustache-ioed, sitting in his new office.



Since the oxygen masks are an essential tool for fighter pilots and usually dangle from the helmet when not in use, I wanted to have them on the WSO and pilot too. As they only come attached to heads, this requires a bit of work though.
First, I cut the helmets with masks in half:



After that, it's a lot of trimming with the exacto blade and sanding with a round file



Until they are nice and thin. I used a dark grey to paint the mask and gunship green for the oxygen hose.



And with another picture of the WSO showing off his fancy helmet, I'll leave you till next time.



Thanks for checking my build and happy modeling!

[Nige201980]

brilliant work mate

[heel]

Now that's just awesome! Great work on the pilots. Perhaps you can save the head for a dio of The Outsiders.

[TheWeasel]

brilliant work mate

Thanks Nige!

Now that's just awesome! Great work on the pilots. Perhaps you can save the head for a dio of The Outsiders.

Thanks! Too bad there's not a lot of 1/48 motorcycles or hot rods around to do a proper greaser dio

[Tiger131]

Great build love the extra detail you have put into this going to look amazing when it's done

[TheWeasel]

Great build love the extra detail you have put into this going to look amazing when it's done

Thank you!

It's time for yet another update!

Canopy work

The last thing to finish up the cockpit is the HUD "projector". My solution is to fill the hole in the front instrument panel cover with PVA glue. Later I painted it in clear green to give it a screen/lens-ish look and glued the glass-part provided by the kit





Buuuut.. as I tried dryfitting the front windshield disaster struck. It wouldn't fit at all!



So I carefully loosened the bond between instrument panel and cover - by carefully applying tamiya extra thin while gently prying it open with the exacto knife.



As you can see, the instrument panel won't quite fit under the cover if the latter is in the correct position for the windscreen to fit. Some careful carving of both instrument panel and cover inside got them to cooperate though.

With this problem fixed, I used the rear canopy as a placeholder to get the right position for glueing the middle canopy piece



With front and middle pieces glued in place, it's time to mask off the canopy. Both pieces had a center seamline running through them. But they were easily taken care off.



Like I did last time I built an academy phantom, I put some masking tape on the inside of the stationary canopy pieces and inside walls of the cockpit tub to hold the canopy pieces in place, that will later be posed open. That way I can paint the canopy matching the camouflage of the airframe.




And with everything in place, I leave you until next time




Thanks for looking and happy modeling!

[Nige201980]

Looking great pity about the hud but you done a great job sorting it mate.

[TheWeasel]

Looking great pity about the hud but you done a great job sorting it mate.

Thanks Nige. Think it's because of the whole -J vs -C version thing. J instrument panel and a C or D cover that looked right but might be a little different still

I've already pushed on ahead and hope to catch up with the updates

[TheWeasel]

Long time without an update again. This annoying life thing keeps getting in the way of my hobbies...

Anyway. Here's some of the things I've done recently:

After closing up the canopy, I glued on the air intakes. There's a small gap that needs filling between intake and fuselage



Next there's a few things to add to the underside. One place another difference between Air Force and Navy Phantoms. When launching from a carrier, F-4s were not attached to the catapult at the nose gear (as seems to be standard nowadays), but at "hooks" at the wing-root. Like so:



Unfortunately, the Academy F-4C kit does not come with these hooks to fill these holes, but only plain covers:



Thanks to my phantom-stash I was able to liberate some pieces from a Hasegawa land-based variant that will not need them:



They did need some adjustment to fit though (before and after):



With some filler, everything is in place and made ready for the paint booth!

[TheWeasel]

Painting the F-4J

First up: primer. I used the AK Primer. And I wanted to say I absolutely love it, but i'll get back to that later:



Then some preshading:



And just a little outlining with a pencil of where I want the camouflage to be:



And then I started with the light blue I bought.. lifecolor FS 35414, wich I thought would fit. But once it was on the model:



It looked not like in my pictures of the real plane...So I used vallejo model air FS 35189 mixed with some white and I think I got the color right:



some Panzer Putty (great stuff!) for masking off the camo lines and dark blue (vallejo model air FS 35177):





I sprayed the underside in FS36622 USAF grey as it didn't look like the navies usual glossy white in the pictures. After that was done, I masked off the wheelbays for the white:



And when that was done, was when my opinion on the primer changed a little.. removing the tape peeled off quite a bit of paint and primer.. nothing that was beyond fixing, but very frustrating nonetheless:



I don't know if it was the primers fault or if there was some release agent on the plastic as I didn't wash the sprues before assembly - something I'll do in the future to see if it was the reason for my problems.

I have since progressed further still, but for now, I'll leave the update here until I have enough material for another one.

Thanks for looking and happy modelling,

Simon

[Spook]

Looking good weasel.great camo scheme to go for as it does get a bit boring with the usual navy whites.
Phabulous phantoms phorever