1/48 Italeri F/A-18E Super Hornet |
|
Gallery Article by Joe Volz
on July 9 2003 |
|
|
Here is my F/A-18E
Super Hornet built from the Italeri kit. I won't go into all of the well known
nightmares involved with this kit, but suffice it to say you have a good bit of
work to do to get a reasonably accurate model built. Fit is not very good
overall, and the intakes are less than fun to work with. The underside of the
fuselage in particular required a lot of filler. The cockpit is very spartan
(decals) so I chose to replace it with the Black Box set. A major improvement,
and highly recommended. The kit weapons are not bad at all, so I chose to use
them, with the exception of the awful GBU "somethings". I did
substitute the targeting pod from the Hasegawa weapons set for the suspect
looking item supplied by Italeri. As far as corrections go, I first added the
IFF antenna box in front of the windscreen from sheet plastic.
Click on
images below to see larger images
|
|
Next I filled the
incorrect speedbrake between the vertical tails, as well as the LEX flaps that
should not be there. The speed brakes on the LEX did not fit well, so they were
filled, sanded and re-scribed. The pylons were toed out and angled, as on the
real aircraft. I also chose to drop the flaps. The decals are from Two Bobs and
represent the CAG bird of VFA-14 "Tophatters" The model is finished
with Polyscale and MM acrylics as well as MM metalizers. Light weathering for
this new bird was an enamel wash.