Hasegawa

1/48 F-104S Starfighter "Tiger Meet 1996"

Kit Number: 09731

Reviewed by  Chad Richmond, IPMS# 10346

MSRP: $43.50 Imported by: Dragon Models USA (www.dragonmodelsusa.com) Here in the last six months or so Hasegawa has started re-releasing their F-104 kits with new markings, predominately last flight markings and Tiger Meet. Even though these kits come with only one set of markings, they are a welcome addition to hobby shop shelves. This particular kit is the Italian F-104S, but has the fancy markings of the 1996 Tiger Meet. There are very, very few pictures of this aircraft around, but the photo used as the box art is great. It clearly shows that the airframe is painted silver, instead of being bare metal. I breathed a small sigh of relief there, as I still haven't gotten brave enough after more that 50 years of modeling to try a true NMF model. The markings are truly unusual in that they depict a tiger that has broken the aircraft's skin on the left side of the fuselage at the wing trailing edge, and emerges aft of the cockpit on the right side. The nose and tail of the aircraft and nose and tail of the tip tanks are painted in a brilliant gloss blue, which really makes a colorful, but simple, color scheme. The blue is supposed to be feathered, but I wasn't brave enough to try to depict it that way. Construction starts, typically, with the cockpit, and other than seatbelts and shoulder harnesses, is quite well done. The instrument panel has raised detail, and there is also a highly detailed decal for the panel. I opted to carefully cut out the segments of the instrument panel and experiment to see if they would lay down and conform to the instruments and switches. To my great delight, with the help of some MicroSet and a Q-Tip, they laid down beautifully. On the side panels, I opted to paint and dry brush. The detail here is also very nice. The ejection seat, to me, is a little short, but is a nice representation of the CQ-7 seat used by the Italians. In keeping with the "out of the box" tradition of a kit review, I printed a picture of Eduard's F-104S colored cockpit set off of their web site and printed it out on some heavy paper. I carefully cut out all of the belts and harnesses and then glued them in place with white glue. I was very happy with the way it looked, when finished. The kit provides clear light insert for all of the fuselage and wing tank position lights, but for some reason, I didn't drill the holes and install them. I can't offer an explanation for why I didn't, except the molded lights look okay when painted bright silver and then clear, red, orange or blue is applied. Next comes the burner can assembly and the main gear well, both of which go together really well, and the inside seam on the burner can is no problem cleaning up. These all go inside the right fuselage half, before joining the fuselage halves. Be sure to dry fit a couple of times to make sure everything fits properly. Mine went together well. Once the fuselage halves are joined, it's time for all kinds of goodies to get attached. After gluing the two halves of the nose cone together, I filled it with BBs. I don't really know if they were needed, but I wasn't taking any chances on having a tail sitter. Due to some intricate painting on the intakes, I opted to leave them off until later. This caused me some minor fit problems later that I was trying to correct with parts already painted silver, but the other option seemed the worse of the two choices. Later, after gluing them in place, I looked at some reference photos and realized I had not filled the seams on the intakes. So, here I am with a finished silver paint job, and I've goy to fill and sand down for seams. Fun! I also left off the wings until later. The flaps and slats can be posed in either up or down positions. I opted for up, since that's normally how you will see a parked F-104. I also left all of the gear assembly off until the model was completely painted and decaled. I first put a base coat of Tamiya's gloss lack on the model and let it cure for a couple of days. I then followed with Floquil's Platinum Mist, mixed about 40/60 with ModelMaster Metallizer thinner. I probably could have used more thinner, but it still went on really well. This mixture dries extremely fast, so a normal painting sequence allowed me to do several coats at one sitting. I also had all of the gear doors, wings, tip tanks and intake trunk parts to do as well. I let this set for about a day and then masked everything off using Tamiya masking tape and Parafilm for the bright blue areas. As I stated earlier, I wasn't geared mentally to test my skills with a feathered edge, so my demarcation lines are crisp. I used Gunze Sanyo's H15, as called for on the instruction sheet, because I couldn't find anything else that looked close to being right, plus, I love Gunze paints. This was my first silver aircraft in a long, long time, and I found during handling that I didn't have nearly enough color coats on the model. I ended up seeing my black primer in many places during the decaling process. The kit decals are a mixed bag on this kit. If you use warm water, they work fairly well, but they are extremely thick, and even with a lot of setting solution application, they never really laid down well. The instrument panel decals lulled me into a false sense of security. The two largest tiger decals covered several vents, inlets and lights, which all but disappeared after application. The positioning of the decals shown on the drawings of the aircraft and the decals them selves, were also a different matter. The turbine path decals all were of the wrong length, and really didn't end up where the turbine really was. I guess I could have cut the red strips off a positioned them properly, but I didn't. The "21st" on each of the vertical fins don't line up at all close to the drawings, or the photo. There aren't that many total decals, but it took me three sessions to get them all on. I didn't do any weathering on the model, because Tiger Meet aircraft are show aircraft and are treated as such. I could tell by the photo that the aircraft was pristine, so I left it that way. Another noticeable feature shown in the photo, and nearly every other photo of an F-104, is the smoothness of the skin and the precise join of the panels. Panel lines on the real thing are almost non existent. The kit definitely overstates the rivets, but it's easier to just leave them alone than to try to coat with Mr. Surfacer and sand, and apply, and sand, and……. I was happy with the overall fit of this kit, and look forward to building several other variants. The molding was still crisp, with very little flash. Surprisingly, there weren't a lot of issues involving ejector pin marks. There are some on the insides of the landing gear doors and the landing gear itself, but these were relatively easy to fix. I've heard of fit problems in the many kit reviews I read, but I didn't have any that weren't insurmountable. Most just required a little tweaking. I didn't spend enough time around the engine inlets as I should have, so they could look a lot better. A little bit of super glue on the spine was the only seam filling I had to do, and I think that could have been avoided with a few swipes of the knife edge when mounting everything into the left fuselage half. A few more dry fittings would have probably taken care of it. Memphis' Rich Van Zandt had given me some alignment warnings concerning wings and landing gear, which came in handy. I went out and bought about seven other F-104 kits, as I was now inspired to do an F-104 collection. Mine won't be any where as large as Rich's collection, but all of his F-104s were an inspiration, to be sure. Now, if all of the after-market companies would re-release their F-104 sets, I'd have it made. My thanks to Dragon USA for supplying the kit and to IPMS/USA for allowing me to do the review.

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