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. 

 

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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. 

I wouldn't look forward to building another of these, but I do have those nice Two Bobs VFA-41 decals for the "F" model...

Joe Volz

      

Photos and text © by Joe Volz