I notice they make both a D and G version. I would assume that Trumpeter does good on about anything . . . but it’s worth asking. Is their 105 a good kit?
I have both of them. Though they are still in the box. From what I can see they are pretty good. Although I believe that there is an issue with the vertical tail on the G. It may not be the right width. Lots of ordinance and a couple of versions for the decals. One of these days I will start the D. I bought mine on sale and paid about 50% off the list price.
Surprisingly, there are some big problems with both of the kits. Mostly with the shape of the nose and the vertical fin/rudder. Most folks I know replace the landing gear with aftermarket metal gear just to hold the weight. If you want a correct 105, prepare to lay out about another $100-165 for resin correction sets. IIRC, Meteor Productions’ web site has listings for corrections sets (Fin/rudder, fuselage, open canopy, metal landing gear, cockpit set, and wheel well set). Just put “F-105” in their search engine. I haven’t started mine yet – afraid to tell my wife that I need to spend a “few” more dollars on correction sets.
I have a number of the Trumpeter kits and from looking at them and reading build reviews, you really have to study each kit to know whether they are worth the money and the effort it takes to build such a big project. Some of them have serious shape problems, but some are pretty good. I think the F-105 isn’t too bad.
I can’t remember where, but someone wrote that after buying the resin vertical tail and placing it next to the Trumpeter tail, that there wasn’t enough wrong with the Trumpeter tail to make the resin tail worth the expense. I have both kits too, unbuilt. I do have the metal gear. The beast is way too heavy to sit on plastic gear given how thin the struts have to be next to the wheels. Very thin. Here is a headon photo I took at Langley AFB in 1967.
The metal main gear struts are an absolute necessity. The metal nose gear strut is better, but the plastic one is OK. The various resin aftermarket external parts are a very slight improvement. If you were looking at just one model, you would have to have an extremely sharp eye to pick out whether it had the mods or not. The Verlinden cockpit & gatling gun AM kit is garbage. The Black Box cockpit kit is a tremendous improvement over the kit, especially the seat. The stock kit seat is barely recognizable as a Thud seat. It even has the arm rests in the raised position, which starts the ejection sequence. The MERs, Multiple Ejector Racks, for the 6 bombs are WAY too skinny and look terrible. The nose radar is OK, but has very little detail. It needs some extra hoses, wires, etc. The door covering the drag chute compartment just behind the rudder has nothing inside. If you look in there, you see the engine. The engine is gorgeous and a kit unto itself, but you can’t see any of it beyond the tail cone once it is installed.
Darwin, O.F. [alien]
Wow, well thanks to all who responded. I’m kind of glad I didnt grab it. I’d really like to start a list of kits to do . . . someday. But at the moment I think I need to focus on high quality kits that are going to do pretty good out of the box until my personal skill set has time to finesse some.
I’ve built them both:
I built the “D” model for a man who flew them in Vietnam and this one has virtually every aftermarket set known to man on it. The “G” is pretty much from the box except for a Blackbox cockpit and metal gear (they both have metal gear).
Don’t pass up on this kit if you can get it at a special sale price, that’s what I did and I bought both versions. I have read the reviews and comments about the fin corrections ect. but I will probably forgo purchasing that paticular set unless I was serious about entering it in a contest. The metal land gear struts will be the primary set to buy, but you can place the kit on a stand with gear up and it should look wicked too.
Scott
I got the G half finished. I got a magnificent resin cockpit (I think it was from Meteor), and a replacement fin and nose cone to correct the shapes. I hadn’t gotten around the getting the metal landing gear, and of course the plastic legs broke 'cause they’re WAY too weak. I set it aside for a while.
A friend of mine built one a while back and said it was a good kit OOB, I saw the finished result and thought it looked the part.