1/72 Special Hobby F-86K

by Niels Dol

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For a long time I wanted to build a F-86K "Kaasjager" (Cheesehunter) of the Royal Dutch Airforce, Kaasjager was a local nickname for the aircraft.  A few years ago, I ordered somewhere in Italy a Resin kit by Tauro models, but I still hadn't the guts to build it, and then, there was the Special Hobby release, which made me very happy! When I got the kit it looked all great, preprinted photoetch for the cockpit, nice detail, and a large decal sheet with several options.

Click on images below to see larger images

  

  

  

I Wanted to build a early version, so I had one problem, the kit wings are a -40 wings and older versions had the -30 wings. So these had to be shortened, and there was a little other thing which had to be changed to make it all perfect, I think it was something with the slats, but I'm not sure about it.  The overall look with the shorter wings is OK to me.  The building process went quite ok, and wasn't that hard, the cockpit was together in only 3 evenings, (hail to the pre-coloured photoetch!! :-) ) and also the rest of the kit went together quite well.

After painting the whole kit with Modelmaster and Humbrol paints, I completed it with decals from Dutch Decal sheet 72039.  The plane is Q-239 with Squadron codes ZX-15 based at Twenthe AFB in the period 1955-1956.

Overall the kit was a very lovely to build, and I probably gonna' get a few more of these and complete them in Norwegian, German and Italian Markings, and of course some more Dutch versions!

I hope you guys like it, and feel free to leave any comments.

Cheers!

Niels
Lelystad, The Netherlands 2007

Photos and text © by Niels Dol