Hi guys. Would any of you be interested in an In-Progress thread of an Italeri 1/48 IAF F-16C Barak? I just finished the Revell F-15E WIP and it seems like a few people enjoyed that. So I thought I might WIP this one too.
Here’s the kit:
Sure would! I’m thrashing thru a wheels-up build of the Italeri F-16 AM/ADF, and it’ll be inspirational to see what you do with the Barak, knowing your skill level. Please post away!
Mike
Oh yes! I want to see what you do with that Israeli camo scheme after what you did with the Strike Eagle.
BTW, your building skills are pretty sharp too![;)]
Can’t wait! I have not seen this kit before, or at least I don’t remember if I have, I thought they did it in 72 scale.
Alrighty! Thanks for the kind words guys! With nice comments like that I think I’ll begin posting.
I’ve got some AM stuff for this kit. Right now I’ve got:
- Aires F-16C Barak cockpit
- Royal Resin weighted wheels
- Brassin AIM-120Bs
There are a few other things I may get like the metal pitot tube and AOA sensors and some AM decals. I will probably add some hydraulic lines to the landing gear as well.
Here’s the Aires cockpit. Its very nicely detailed but there is much surgery needed to make it fit into the kit fuselage parts:
I didn’t take a before pic but here you can see where I sanded out the details on the inside of the upper fuselage part. I also cut out some of the plastic behind where the seat will be. I also removed some of the plastic to widen the space where the IP coaming will fit. I just bought a Dremel 3000 and it worked great sanding out the fuselage part:
On thing that is really nice is that the ejection seat slides down into those guide rails and the fit is spot on. I have no idea how they mold these!
One thing I try to do when I build is to get much of the smaller details out of the way at the beginning. Many of you saw on the F-15E build that I had the weapons, fuel tanks and wheels assembled and painted at the beginning. I’m doing that here with this build, too.
Here are the fuel tanks assembled and primed:
I can tell you already that this kit is not nearly as nice as the Tamiya kit…not even close!
I stumbled onto your technique of getting the small stuff out early on my current GB project. The hardest part of any model for me is the final details. So building them first takes most of that pain out of the mix.
Here’s the cockpit painted up. Its missing a few resin and PE parts that will be attached later. The base grey color was airbrushed on but all of the detail painting was hand brushed on. I still need to wash the tub and the side panels:
In the pic below the flash really highlights the dry brushing. It looks much better to the naked eye:
After dry fitting the tub into the fuselage half I realized that I needed to sand the bottom of the tub down quite a bit. I had to sand it down to the point where I began sanding into the bottom of the tub. This is OK since the ejection seat covers it up. In the pic below you can see the effect the sanding had:
Here’s the ejection seat. Its 95% complete. All that is missing are some PE details that I will put on at the very end or else I’ll break them off. This has been washed and its the same wash I’ll be giving to the tub:
Here’s the tub with a wash applied. Its really visible in the olive drab floor part and on the sidewalls:
That cockpit tub paint work looks fantastic. Aires does like to use a lot of resin in the sidewalls and tub structure.
That tub might be heavy enough that you might not need any additional weight up front to keep it from tail-sitting.
Thanks!
Maybe. I’ve actually already added some. I might try to add a resin exhaust and if I do that it will probably become a tail sitter. I used Aves Apoxie Sculp and mixed in some steel bird shot:
I just mix it up into something that looks like cookie dough:
And then stuff it into the nose cone:
That ought to do it.
I’m thinking that a nosecone full of bird shot might make for some false returns on the tracking radar…[:P]
Ha! Yeah, you’d think you’d be flying into a mountain!
This kit is very similar to the Tamiya kit in the way that the parts are broken down…but the fit of the parts and the crispness of the parts is not even close to the Tamiya kit. In fact, I think this is a reboxing of the Kinetic kit which is newer than the Tamiya kit!
Here’s the intake. I’ve built two Tamiya F-16s before and both times I assembled the intakes completely before installing them into the lower fuselage part. Doing this allows you to make the unit seamless. Otherwise the instructions have you assemble the intake into a front half and a rear half and install them separately.
These took alot of sanding before they were good enough. Plus, they had really large ejector pin marks that had these sprue stalagmites sticking up out of them. In the end, though, I think I did pretty good with them.
I used the “pour & dump” method of pouring white latex paint into the intake and then dumping it out and letting it dry. Its a little grainy because I lightly sanded out a few blemishes in the paint:
Here’s the compressor face. Again, this part isn’t nearly up to Tamiya standards. I painted it Alclad II Steel and highlighted the raised detail with silver:
Yikes, that compressor face is pretty much featureless.
Would it be worth it to make a bunch of tiny triangles to shove in there as blades?
I’ve assembled the fuselage parts that wrap around the forward intake. I hate to sound like a broken record but, again, the fit of the parts is surprisingly bad.
I’ve also painted and attached the intake lip. Some people like to attach this part at the beginning and sand it seamlessly with the intake. Then later on they will mask it and paint it the old fashioned way. I think it easier to paint it and attach it later:
The top of the completed assembly leaves some fairly large steps. One of these steps is the result of the lip piece not mating flush with the fuselage parts. The other steps are just bad molding on the parts themselves[bnghead]. I used Aves Apoxie Sculpt to fill in the depressed space:
After sanding you can see how much filler was needed to make the part seamless:
No, it wouldn’t be worth it in my opinion simply because you really can’t see it once its installed. Even if you shine a light in there to look at it its so far back that it is hard to see any detail. It just bugs me, though, that a modern $40+ kit has terrible detail like this.
I can understand the irk, Fly. That’s one reason I love Trumpeter kits so much- they detail the hidden parts to a good degree.
The main reason I bought this kit was because it included the Barak parts and weapons. I should have just bought the Tamiya kit and the AM resin parts for a few $$ more to build it up into a Barak. Oh well, I’m in it for the long haul now.
Besides, isn’t this what modeling is? Taking a bad kit and trying to make it good? This will sharpen some skills I haven’t used in a while since I’ve been getting pampered by Tamiya and Hasegawa[Y].
I have no doubt that this will be awesome when finished. I’m looking forward to the paint work to see how you layer it up.