Other than a little clean up here and there, this one is pretty much finish.
The Zotz decals are excellent though the tail modex letters appears smaller than shown on the real bird. The resin 400 gal centerline is by Fisher model and is excellent and is heavy too. An improvement over the kit tanks.
I used 4,000 grit sandpaper for the top of the boarding ladder and the steps. Like some other trumpeter jet kits I heard about, this one too has issues with the canopy not fitting in the close position properly. I will later fix it in the open position.
Over all it was a fun kit to build but there are a few accuracy problems with it. And note…the Master Details jet pilot figure will not fit into the seat, the seat is just too narrow for the figure.
It is a pretty good kit. it does have some very nice features and it left out some obvious ones too like the wiring assembly attached to the nose gear. The two catapult hooks were small and looks like they came from a 1/48 kit. With the exception of painting the intake trunk white and the engine silver, I didn’t detail the engine since I planned of cementing the fwd and aft fuselage halves together for a tighter fit. Had some issues with the slats roller assemblies not wanting to fit into the wings and had to cut them back to fit. I used the kit supplied metal landing gear and considering the weight of the resin drop tank, I’m glad I did. I first attached the tank to the centerline rack, for added support I drilled a hole into the top center of the tank, inserted a cut paperclip into it then repeat it for the rack. I glued the two together with superglue then when ready, to the plane. I have the ‘E’ version in the stash and if Zotz re-release their VMA-211 decal sheet, I will move it up on the ‘To build list’.
