1/48 Hasegawa F-18A

Overly aggressive Aggressor 

by Shawn Phantom Weiler

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Look in the ARC story section and you will see the whole story plus photos. Short version. Two VFC-12 F-18s were playing bad guys for VF-41 several years back. The hornets collide. The brown one looses everything from the firewall up. The blue looses part of a wing and a bit of the tail. The important part is somehow both pilots brought their planes back and survived to fight another day. Even if the planes themselves would never fly again.

The model is the Hasegawa F-18 plus after market cockpit. I have no idea which one as I received this model all ready started. (Tony does really great work by the way.)

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The cockpit was all ready installed, I sanded off all Tony's "C" parts to recreate a "A" Hornet. The kit was missing a number of parts( which is why Tony gave it to me). Luckily I had an old Hornet which was no longer up to standards. I took out a dremil and cut off the intakes and other parts I would need. Once all the usable parts were taken, the hulk was given to my youngest daughter who painted it as you see in the photo at the bottom. The nose simply was butchered off and I added some plastic rod in the shapes I saw in the one and only reference photo I had. A couple of tubes from left over SeaKing detail sets. some rubber tube from A phantom Cockpit and a whole bunch of electrical wires (which for some reason don't show up in the photos) and I was good to go. The red box is a 1/35 ammo can sanded to shape and painted.

I even was able to save the entire Clear sprue for the spare box but for some strange reason I mailed it to Australia with a trade that had nothing to do with F-18 parts. Oh-well.

The decals are a mix of Two Bobs VFC-12 and High decals. The Two Bobs were great but had the wrong stars and bars as shown in the photo I had. So that's why I also used the high decals.

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Below you can see my daughters take on the next phase of aggressor markings. She always paints the canopy first for some strange reason. Mine looks a little strange missing the nose, but it was a nice break from the everyday.

Shawn

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Photos and text © by Shawn Phantom Weiler