Searched and found a post by someone who said the old monogram f-16xl was going to be in FSM either soon or recently. I have one that I am trying to decide how to build, and am trying to see how others have overcome the fuselage plug problem this kit is supposed to have. Any trail blazers out there with advice to share?
I built a couple of them right after they came out. The first wasa single seat version with a couple zillion bombs underneath. The second was a two seater. I took the basic single seat kit, re configured the cockpit with the Italeri 2 seat option and went from there. I didn’t have any appreciable fit problems
Darwin, O.F. [alien]
It’s nice to know that NASA wound up with, I believe, the two-seater, and until recently was still using it for some kind of wing research for proposed hypersonic aircraft. It’s a beautiful airplane that was, if I recall correctly, beaten out by the F-15E for the light bomber contract in the early- to mid-80s.
That cranked-arrow wing is an elegant design and I would have loved to have seen them about the skies, but such are the ways of contract letting, and I’m not schooled enough to know if the Pentagon made a wise decision to go with the F-15 in the strike roll or whether it should have been the F-16, which I suppose would have become the F-16E, would it not? I wish I’d kept the kit. Wasn’t there one in 1/48, also by Monogram? I remember well the red, white and blue scheme on one of the prototypes.
TOM
There was a two seater version of this kit? I imagine it must be very rare now! I was hoping to take an old Italeri F-16 kit and kitbash a two seater up, make one that would hypothetically look like a production unit had the aircraft been accepted instead of the F-15E (not likely, but that is part of the fun of model building - using imagination). Anyway, I read a review on “M2 reviews” that said the stock kit was kind of a design level mock up and not very accurate, that the fuselage was incorrectly shaped (especially the engine nacelle) because Monogram didn’t work it correcly due to a guess on where the fuselage plugs should be. Anyway, if anybody out there knows more on how the accuracy of this kit can be improved, please give me a reply on this post. Thanks a ton!
Monogram made only the single-seat version in 1/72 scale only, with the gray wing and fuselage, but red/white/blue fin. The problem with the kit, IIRC, was that the location of the intake was too far forward. There was an article in the IPMS/USA Quarterly in the mid 1980s on correcting the kit.
There was also a 1/32 scale kit by some outfit in the Orient, but they made the same mistake on the overall shapes, and then copied the detail parts from the old 1/32 Hasegawa F-16A kit. Don’t know of any F-16XL kit in 1/48 scale.
The Monogram kit also has some other inaccuracies to it as well,
"The strakes on the XL do not extend forward along the sides of the nose like the production F-16, that might be the difference you are seeing. In fact the throttle area on an F-16 protrudes slightly into the strake area, and on the XL you can see a small hump/bubble on the left side under the canopy to provide clearance for the throttle mount. The radome is identical on the airplanes, I don’t have the kit in front of me to compare.
There were two fuselage plugs (extensions) added to the XLs, the forward plug was between the cockpit and the wing but did not include the intake, so the real XL nose is longer but not the intake. On the Monogram kit they lengthened both so the intake/nose gear should be moved back to maintain proper spacing forward of the main gear, which did not move. This mod is not too hard to do.
The rear plug not only lengthened the fuselage but tilted the rear of the airplane up approximately 3 degrees. This was done to allow for ground clearance of the now-longer rear fuselage when the aircraft rotated on takeoff (and landing). This plug was between the (original) wing and the engine so the engine moved back with the tail. By that I mean the internal inlet ducting in front of the engine was lengthened, not the tailpipe. Hope that makes sense. The Monogram kit has the extension but not the upward tilt. Adding the tilt would be a major task as you’d have to deal with the wing root and fuselage joint all along the aft chord length.
These are pretty major mods to the Monogram kit, but even without them the Monogram kit is light-years better than the old 1:32 Ace/Revell-Germany/Trumpeter/Zhengdefu hack job on the original Hasegawa molds. That kit included none of the fuselage plugs - they merely grafted a poor approximation of the XL wing onto the standard F-16 fuselage."
habu2
f-16.net
Here’s a link to his site which includes the IPMS article:
http://www.habu2.net/vipers/xl/index.html
Regardless, I’m still building a 1/72 XL OOB. They’re just too cool to not have one!
For all things Viper…
http://www.f-16.net/
Topic is the paint schemes AND there’s a pic of a 1/48 conversion in this thread…
http://www.f-16.net/f-16_forum_viewtopic-t-569.html
The Italeri F-16 kit has the option of single or double cockpit. I used the cockpit, canopy and fuselage fairing from this kit to convert the Monogram F-16XL to a two seater. I don’t know of 2 seater OOB for this kit.
Darwin, O.F. [alien]
I have the IPMS mag and it is the best reference I have found to fix the kit if you want to go to the trouble. I would love to get my hands on a couple of these and do one OOB and one with the correction (guess which would get done first).
You guys rock, that is enough info to more than get me started! Sorry about the mis-understanding about the 2 seater. I had heard the Kangnam 1/32 was worse than the Monogram, even though the Mono has it’s problems. But with this advice, I got a good run at it (especially the IPMS details). Thanks!
When General Dynamics first built these two airplanes, they painted them in a very patriotic red, white and blue scheme. They were very similar, but slightly different, with the colors reversed in a couple of places. I have some pictures around here somewhere of them sitting on the tarmac together. I’ll see if I can find them and at least describe them to you.
Darwin, O.F. [alien]