I picked up the kit a few years for about five dollars, I tinkered with it a little about a year ago and then moved on to other kits. Recently I dug back into the box and found I was missing the pilots instrument panel, go figure right, lol, so I had to scratch build one.
At this point I have gotten the both wings built, but only one is filled and sanded. The low down on this kit is its a MONSTER…one side of a sprue is perfectly aligned, the other side is misaligned by a sixteenth of an inch, and in some places more.
The windscreen and canopy have separate frames, I’m not looking forward to them.
The bang seats are completely wrong, but since its a ceiling hanger for my younger cousins, I’m not stressing about it, on the same note, the cockpits are WAY huge for the 48th scale pilots Im putting in them.
Now the seam work on this will definetly give me practice, they are everywhere…
heres the lower fuselage half, since its gear up I had to fill the nose landing gear doors with strip styrene, CA, and Mr. Surfacer. Of all the gear doors the nose was the worst of them, they fit pretty well, but were 1/8 in below the surface of the rest of the fuselage underside.
The wings, these are another monsterous set of parts. The flaps are seperate, were warped, and arent right shape to fill up the trailing edge openings, one side was also misaligned, so lots of filling and sanding…One of the wings is pretty much finished, but I still have a few low spots to fill after covering the seams with silver paint to bring the blemishes out, I’ll take close ups a little later
I have the same kit! So I’ll be watching your build on this to see how she goes together! I was in Desert Storm and actually had the opportunity to work with the Brits and their beautiful Tornados! So I had to get this kit when I saw it! Thanks for posting the pics! I look forward tot he rest of the build!
This one sounds like a real bear to work on. I’m not sure, but it may be the early ESCI kit of the prototype/pre-production aircraft with updated “Desert Storm” markings. I don’t know if the kit was ever updated to GR.1 standards.
Does this kit have that odd, almost-pebbly surface texture like other ESCI kits of that era?
made some filling and sanding progress, unfortunately I haven’t had the opportunity for photography as of yet.
As far as the progress goes, I made new mounting holes for the tailerons and whittled down their mounting axels to fit the styrene tube I used to make the new mounts. The mold misalignments on the inboard sides of both tailerons have been evened out with the ever present Mr Surfacer 500.
All the low spots on the lower fuselage have been filled with Mr Surfacer 1000 and sanded smooth.
The wings are complete, only thing left to do is even out the trailing edges of both flaps, they too were marred by mold misalignment. I’m also making a guard to insure the wing sweep gears don’t become misaligned in the future.
The vertical tail has also been assembled, there were no locator pins for alignment and the left half was slightly warped, so out came the Testors liquid cement, metal spring clips and slow seam work. Even having taken the time to attempt getting the halves aligned left me with much seam work to do and two very large dimples at the base of the tail just above the burner cans.
Pictures to follow tomorrow, by then I should be about a leg up on my homework.
well I have about a dozen new in progress pictures to post but I cant get the rich formatting tool bar to come up and I cant edit my posts when I hit the edit icon… Am I the only one having this issue
heres another assembly hic-up, due to the way the fuselage is split, I’ve had to make spreaders for the lower half and will have to add styrene reinforcements to the halves to get more gluing area once I get to the point that I’m assembling the halves.
