1/72 Italeri F-104S-ASA

Gallery Article by Fabio Bongiorno on Nov 4 2011

 

Hi to everybody, this is my 3rd post on ARC. It is about an F-104S-ASA.  
The kit is an Italeri 1/72.  I decided to represent it in flight so I displayed it on wood base. The kit is pretty simple with just almost 50 pieces of a quite good light grey plastic. The overall shape is right; only the tip tank dimensions are just a bit smaller compared to other kit suc Revell/Hasegawa, but the effect is not bad.  

I pretty much built it OOB except for the decal set that is a Skymodel dedicated to the Italian F-104s of all period.  I chose to represent a special one based at Trapani Air Base of the 18th Squadron under the 37th Wing.

My goal on this one was to apply every good advice and technique I found here about painting.  After completing the small cockpit I closed the two half of fuselage, glued the wings and tiptanks, than I closed the gear doors.

 

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I started then with painting.  At first I applied a hand of Tamiya grey primer; after that a hand of dark sea grey XF-54 Tamiya and then I used the satin black XF-85 to preshade the panel lines.   After this process I decided to rescribe panel lines with a steel tool I recently bought on purpose.   I let the paint dry for a day and then I started with the first hand of XF-53 using the airbrush and a fine needle trying to paint almost panel by panel not covering entirely the preshading.  I then completed the second hand with the same technique.

After this I completed the painting with the XF-50 for the top part of the radome and used XF-2 for the bottom part.  Two coats of gloss varnish and I started decaling. The set of Skymodel decals is very fine and they don't silver too much.  I then sealed everything with another coat of gloss X-2 letting it dry for 24 hours. A little bit of weathering with oils (black, dark grey and brown), not too much cause the real plane in some pics is not so dirty.  I sealed the weathering with a satin varnish. To complete it I painted in black the wood base and displayed the F-104 in flight.

Thanks a lot.

Enjoy the photos

Fabio Bongiorno

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Photos and text © by Fabio Bongiorno