I got a good deal on the old Monogram 1/72 F-16XL from a friend in my club ( i.e. FREE, lol) and even though its a basket case I decided to give it a good try at building it up into a good “what-if” representation.
Now for a little bit of history on the Viper “XL”. This was General Dynamics attempt at the deep penetration strike fighter concept that would eventually turn into the F-15E. To my knowledge, only two were built, one single seater and one two seater.
The Monogram kit is a representation of the single seat model.
SO, yes my kit is a true basket case. Its donor used it for a pattern for an XL conversion for the soon to be released Tamiya 72nd scale F-16, so instead of a one piece upper fuselage and wing, mine is in three pieces, a center section and a left and right wing. The other area that gave of itself for this conversion are the “canoes” on the upper wing halves, so I have to scratch build them once I get that far along.
Over the easter weekend I got started doing a fair bit of cutting, sanding, filling, and scape’n. I got a new exhaust for my kit from this kits donor as well a new cockpit and main landing gear, but thats for another post.
Anyway, I removed the kits exhaust area by drilling next to the last panel line before the kits bitter end and will graft on an RoG F-16 exhaust.
Anyway, I have to get to my evening class, I’ll add more to this tomorrow and hopefully pictures.
well I did some work last night , the Mr. Surfacer I put in the bottom intake lip to even its contours out and even with a full day to dry, the Mr. Surfacer 500 I used as the base for the contouring. Well I’m sanding away happy as a lark then I look down and see the Mr. Surfacer has folded over on itself slightly in a corner of the intake. So that ended the sanding for the night. I let the intake half set up over night and will do some work on it tonight as well take pictures once I get to work this afternoon.
On another note, here are some other things I plan on doing with the kit to make it slightly more even with all these new Viper kits out today.
My friends RoG kit also provided me with a new upper forward fuselage I’m going to graft into the Monogram upper fuselage, I robbed the entire MLG assembly, an exhaust, all the clear parts, the cockpit, and a few other little pieces.
The only real aftermarket part I’m going to use is a resin ACES-II seat, everything else will be plastic.
Looking forward to this. This is one of the few kit from my early days that I still have, though its looking a bit worse for wear. I don’t think I have ever seen another built, so will be watching closely.
thanks fellas, after a little bit of trouble with posting a reply here last night, I have pictures to share
First, this is how much of the rear end I had to remove to get the new exhaust to fit, and it fits perfectly at the last panel line on the rear end. I spent two nights with a pin vise and files to get the upper and lower fuselage correct
next up is the fuselage/wing, heres the basket case part
The intake, first with the upper half
The dark spot in the middle of the Mr Surfacer is the top of the kits nose wheel well, the filler to get the inner intake contours is that thick
Now in its two pieces
And finally the RoG donor parts.
I bought a set of Aires ACES-II seats for this kit on-line this morning, so the only real aftermarket part is on its way, lol.
yes sir she was definetly unique beyond a doubt and since I’m doing so many mods to get the accuracy level higher, I’m going to be painting and modding it to late ( as in current) Viper standards, but this weekend is going to be measuring and getting ready to graft fuselages
good so far, but try a different color as a back ground. the real ones were a great air frame. I was sad to see that it was a no go for this bird. I also worked on the yf 23 design stage
did some cutting over the weekend, and am getting the fuselage ready for the RoG graft.
I tried a new way of precision cutting as well, a straight pin with its head cut off, chicked in a pinvise, talk about nice, you can cut on a panel line and really not worry about the tip skipping or going where its not supposed to.
My Aires resin ACES-II came in as well, and I thought I’d seen tiny before, these things have all kinds of PE to go with them.
Aside from the cutting, I did some grinding and sanding to the cockpit tub and lower fuselage to get a little clearance for the RoG parts.
I’ll take pictures tomorrow and post them to update the progress.
Over the weekend I was able to make first major cuts on the fuselage, namely the panel line immediately forward of the IFR receptical and the radome panel line. In the end I has a slight length variation, but it’ll be invisible once I get everything filled.
I used my new cutting technique to remove the RoG fuselages M-61 cannon fairing because if I left it as is it wouldve been lost once the filling and sanding begins.
Now for the join where the old meets the new. I tried to match up the fuselage spine contours as best I could, but there will lots of filling, sanding and scribing in my future.
