1/72 Hobbycraft Northrop F-89B  

by J.C. Bahr

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I have always wanted to do an F-89B of the 190th FIS of the Idaho ANG, but never could find markings for this particular unit.  Supposedly Academy or Hobbycraft were to have re-released this kit with these markings and I have seen one review on the internet that seems to confirm that it was released, but I never could find one and heard from one builder that the decals were not very good at all.
 
Okay, so forget the project for a while or plow into it full speed with wreckless disregard for a minor setback?...
 
I chose to use the Hobbycraft kit for this build as it is the only F-89B to be found in 1/72 scale... BIG mistake!  If I had it to do over again, I would highly suggest getting a Revell/Monogram F-89D/J in this scale and modifying it with parts from any of the Hobbycraft series of Scorpions to get the variant you want... as it's GOTTA be easier than the self-inflicted h*ll I put myself through with this kit and another that I built right alongside this one!

The Hobbycraft series of F-89's look good in the box and on the instructions, but when it comes to the glue hitting the plastic... they rank with some of the worst kits I've ever built!  For one there is a serious issue with the mounting of the seats in the cockpit tub and then the mounting of the tub in the fuselage... no matter how I tweaked the kit, the front seat seems to sit too far back and the rear seat has to be cut down to sit lower in the tub to clear the mis-shaped and Coke-bottle thick canopy provided by Hobbycraft.

The intakes, lower fuselage piece and exhaust pieces took a lot of test-fitting... cursing... filing & test-fitting... more cursing... sanding & test-fitting... even more cursing... re-file, re-sand & re-test-fit... still more cursing that the neighbors heard next-door!  There are horrible gaps at the wing-to-fuselage joints and the tip-tanks to the wing-tips!  The nose on the F-89B I believe is a little too short and too pointed at the tip... it should be a little more bulbous according to reference photos.  I chose to ignore this last little glitch... as the fact that I got the kit as acceptable as it is is a minor miracle... and I gave up trying to figure out how to fix the nose!  Took great patience and restraint to keep this one from impacting the basement wall several times.

Click on images below to see larger images

Since I had no decals to do the Idaho ANG, I decided to try replicating them with Testors clear decal film and my Epson Stylus C66 Dura-Brite printer.  In PhotoShop Elements I created separate clear stars with a black outline and did the same for the serial number on the top of the vertical stab.  On the kit, I sprayed the yellow paint, masked the striping, applied the star decals to their places so the yellow would show through the clear decals and then filled in the areas in-between with hand-painted black paint.  These areas were then masked with liquid latex rubber while the rest of the model was painted.  Unfortunately the liquid latex did pull up the black paint in a few small places, so I had to go back and do some touch-up later.

I tried using Pollyscales acrylic ATSF Silver railroad color and had no luck with it as it kept wanting to spatter no matter what I tried, so I then sanded down the worst areas, polished them a bit and applied Floquil's Old Silver enamel with much better success.

I had to sand out the center frame-bar on the canopy and then polish the canopy because the B-models of the Idaho ANG did not have these.

Late in their service life, later model F-89's started receiving a machined nose-wheel... but for most of their service careers they used a six-spoked wheel that is not the one that either Hobbycraft or Revell replicated in their kits unfortunately.  I took a nose wheel from a DML P-38, chucked it in my Dremel tool and proceeded to go to work sanding it down to the correct size in comparison to the F-89 kit wheels.  I then used an Xacto knife to do some carving on the spokes.  Once I was happy, I copied them in RTV rubber and cast them in resin.  They're not perfect, but they look better than the kit wheels... since I'm not aware of any early model Scorpion ever being fitted with the later machined wheel.

Once the nose-wheel hurdle was overcome, I realized that the main gear legs were going to need to be shortened by about 3 mm... otherwise the kit was going to have an overly exaggerated tail-high stance.  If you're building an Academy version of a Hobbycraft Scorpion, be warned that you may need to shorten the nose strut as well... Academy seems to have re-engineered/re-molded this part of the kit on their F-89D and it sits too high.

After attachment of the landing gear and final clear coats, the model was done... and I've never been so elated to finish a project and move on to something new!

J.C.

Photos and text © by  J.C. Bahr