1/72 Italeri X-35 JSF |
Gallery Article by Ray Seppala
on
Sept 26 2003
|
|
|
|
X-35 JSF
Royal Australian Air Force
With
the looming retirement of the RAAF's
F111 and F/A18 fleets the Australian government has jumped on the JSF bandwagon and
become involved in the System Development and Demonstration (SDD)
phase of the JSF program. This aircraft may see operational
service with the RAAF from 2012.
I
decided to build the JSF in RAAF colours for the ACT Scale Modeller's
Society display at the annual Malkara Model Railway and Scale Model
Exhibition which was held in August this year.
This year the club's display was themed '100 years of Powered Flight'
which included aircraft from the Wright Flyer to the JSF. This was
a quick build and I did not go into
any heavy detailing.
Click on
images below to see larger images
|
|
I
had seen Tom Myers' Thunderbird JSF conversion. It looked like something I
could manage so I had a go. The
Italeri kit is of an early prototype and the current design has already changed
since the kit was produced. I converted the Italeri X-35 'C' to an 'A' by
closing the lift engine inlet and exhaust doors and puttying them over. I
did not worry about all of the corrections Tom made but did replace the kit
seat with a resin ACES II seat I found in the spares
box, the kit seat looked a tad bare. I also replaced the exhaust nozzle with a
1/48 Hornet nozzle from the spares box which looked more the part. The
rest to the build was as per the instructions.
The
RAAF F111 fleet is currently painted in standard USAF gunship grey colours.
As this JSF would be a 'strike' bird from 1 Squadron I finished the model in
this colour. I used metalisers for the exhaust nozzle and aft engine
panels and did the landing gear and wheel wells white as per the kit
instructions. When I coated the model in future for decaling I noticed
that the shade of grey darkened up. So I masked up a few panels and
recoated them with the original colour to give a bit of depth to an otherwise
plain scheme. After decaling I sealed the decals with a flat coat.
The flat coat did not effect the colour of the resprayed panels.
I
used a Hawkeye Models Australia F111 Red Flag 2003 decal sheet to finish
the kit off. These aircraft wore distinctive tail art to this year's Red
Flag meet which consisted of a diving
Kookaburra clutching a 500lb bomb in its feet.
As I said this was a quick build (for me) and I was happy with the results.
Ray Seppala