Hasegawa

1/72 F/A-18F Super Hornet "VFA-154 BLACK KNIGHTS CAG"

Kit Number: 00857

Reviewed by  Fred Amos, IPMS# 6672

MSRP: $30.95 The kit comes with about 100 light gray parts, a sprue of clear parts and poly parts for the stabilizers. There is a very small amount of flash and can be removed easily with a hobby knife. Construction is pretty much straight forward with only a very few minor problems. The instructions show building up the cockpit, gluing that to the bottom of the fuselage, (on top of the nose gear wheel well) and then trapping that into the left and right parts of the upper forward fuselage. I made the mistake of gluing the instrument hood and panel in place at this time. After the upper and lower fuselage parts are glued together the assembled nose section is supposed to just slip up into the opening and be glued into place. But because I wasn't paying attention it wouldn't fit. The problem was the second seat instrument panel was hitting the bottom of the upper deck. I had to carve away a little of the upper deck so the nose would slide back a little to make the fit. My fault but it worked out in the end.

Assembly continues on with the intakes, the wings, fuel tanks and pylons. There is very little need for fillers. In order to mount the under wing stores you must open the holes in the bottom wing panels. The panels are then glued onto the upper wing parts and the seams puttied. I chose not to putty this area because it didn't appear to need it.

After the airframe is assembled the model is ready for painting. I used Model Master paints for the upper and lower grays and Floquil enamels for the black and white areas, tires, and landing gear struts etc. One of the more difficult areas for me was installing all of the fins to the missiles. Super glue sets too fast and jumps up and gets all over the tweezers. Just a drop of liquid solvent melts the paint and is dried up before I can get the part into the tweezers and place it where it belongs. So I resorted to using Testors tube glue. That left a bit of the glue showing and was way too fragile, but it got the job done. Decals went done without any problems and of course were compatible with Micro Sol and Solve and Champ solutions. The decal sheet includes markings for the same aircraft in two different time frames of its life span. It also includes just about every bit of stenciling that Boeing would put on the Super Hornet, some so small as to be invisible with out a magnifying glass. So I didn't put all of the stencils on the model. So all in all, I found the kit to be a joy to build but very difficult to handle. There are so many pieces that can be touched and knocked off. The only way I found to handle it is to place a finger at the tip of the nose and another over the exhausts and move it very carefully. My thanks to Hasegawa/Dragon USA and IPMS/USA for the pleasure of doing this review.

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