F-15E EAGLE
Tamiya 1/32 Scale

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I got a big step done today, at least an emotional big step. I got the main parts of the center fuselage put together.  What that means is that I am not very far from painting the camouflage - which is very exciting.

 

The first thing was a scrub down with some dish soap and a toothbrush followed (when dry) by a coat of primer.


Attaching the intake trunks was a bit of a challenge.  The rear wheel wells are part of the intake assembly and there was quite a large gap.  It turns out the support post and some little knobs for the landing gear were too high by over 1/8 of an inch (5-10mm).  After trimming, sanding, fitting repeated many times everything snugged up and only a little clamping was needed. 



After the intakes were in the halves of the fuselage went together but had a bit of a fit issue.  I looked at a few online build logs and they all commented on how well everything fit.  I was sort of hoping for a description of how to fix my problem which they apparently did not have.  The problem was solved by trimming near where some tabs fin into slots above the intakes.  Once that was fixed everything went together as advertised with only a small amount of sanding and filling.  It just occurred to me that the problem may have been caused by my surgery on the intake trunks.  The distance it was out was close to the amount of material that would have been lost in the cut.  Hope it does not affect me anywhere else.

  

Once everything was dry I added the  IsraCast resin tail booms and ECM pods to the end of them

 

You can see the square end of the ECM pods.  These are square on the US F-15s.  The Israeli's also added counter measures in the tail booms that the US fighters don't have.  You can see the dispensers in the white resin parts.  The IsraCast resin was soft and easy to work with, not at all like the Avionix cockpit, which was hard as a rock.

  

Before the fuselage halves went together I added the cannon.

 

I painted the gun with Alclad II steel and man did it look good.  Very similar sheen to a picture I have of it.  I was not sure if I wanted to add a wash and dry brushing - but I did and I think it looks good.



Getting the gun in place was probably the hardest maneuver I have made so far with this kit.


  

Finally - putting together the wings.

 

One of my favorite steps in building any airplane model  - Putting the wings together.


I had to fill a seam here so I used the Vallejo gap filler.  After it dried I used a cotton swab moistened in denatured alcohol and gently wiped the extra filler away.  With a gentle hand this method works awesome.


The Eduard PE set has some great options, and some not so great options.  Here I have cut away the small oval fuel dump port and replaced it with a PE part.  The part looks great and looks like scale thickness.  Much better than the kit part if they will stay on.

  

I had never used Future/Pledge on a canopy before but everything that I read on line and in FSM raved about it.  SO after removing the seam in the canopy and buffing it out I tried airbrushing the future on.  This worked terrible.  The great thing about Future is that it comes right off with Windex - even if it is dry, so I cleaned of the canopy and tried again.  This time I dunked it in a jar of Future and let it dry under a dust cover and WOW!  I can't believe how good it looked, and as advertised it looked a lot closer to scale thickness.  One other problem is that the front wind screen had a scratch in it that I sanded out too.  I learned quickly that when sanding clear plastic start with 1000 grit.  I started with 600 and it was really hard to remove the scratches.  I also learned that the buffer on the Dremel with toothpaste as a buffing compound works great.

The reason I am doing the canopy now is because after fiddling with the wings and trying to figure out how to paint the body of the F-15 I realized that it would be easier to mask the canopy and paint it with the rest of the aircraft rather than trying to match the camouflage later.
 

After the first pass.  I started this with a1200 grit sanding pad.


Moved on to 3000 and 6000 grit.


And finished with 12,000 grit.


I think this is before Future.  I hope so because when you blow it up this much it looks like it still needs work.  Ill have to check it out with my magnifying glasses.

  


I added some photoetch parts for the formation lights and a few panels on the body of the plane.  I am not convinced that replacing a few panels adds that much.  There are definitely PE parts that add a ton and parts that would be better left off.  In fact I have left off a few already.
 

These PE parts add a lot I think.



These ones... Not so much since the detail I scraped off is almost as good at the PE part.

  


The ejection seats were an area that I thought I had figured out till I opened the Verlinden set that I had.   Total Crap, at least the resin parts were.  The PE parts look great though.  So I pulled out the kit part and the seats that came with the Avionics cockpit set.  The kit parts are quite good and the Avionics ones are excellent except for a few molding issues but I saw a Aires set at a store in Salt Lake that looked fantastic.  I bought them and as I was examining the I realized that there were no rails on the back - Go figure.  So I guess that I will use the Aires seat and the Verlinden PE framing and harness.
 


Kit Part - Pretty Good


Verlinden - Garbage


Avionix - Nice Detail


Aires - Awesome

  


One thing I wanted to get done before the major assemblies got in the way was painting the exhaust area.  This was rather exciting to me because it was my first major use of the Alclad II finishes.
 



You can start to see some of the pannel variation in these pictures but you can't see it by the end.




Zoom the pictures out to actual size (about 20%) to get the effect of the shading.  When the pictures are zoomed in it does not look that good.



  


Added some photo etch to the lantrin pods. 

 

I am definitely getting better at PE but what I am really getting better at is not getting blobs of CE glue everywhere.  I also got a new Tamiya diamond file for PE that works awesome.

  


I have pretty much reached the point where there is nothing else to do until the major assemblies are together. This is a pretty exciting time when building a jet model because it really starts to look finished, even though there are a ton of things to do after this.
 

The first step was to join the main fuselage with the forward one.  I think I may have cracked something in the cockpit under the tape.  We will see tomorrow.

  


While doing other things I put together some of the ordinance and stuff.  I don't have any actual Israeli wing stores so I will have to use the kit parts.  The lantrin pods are the same as on the US Eagles anyway.
 

 


I also fixed a problem with the variable geometry intake ramps.  Tamiya made them moveable but that left a huge gap in the top where the hinge was.  On the real plane there is  a slight offset where the ramps slide but it is hardly noticeable.  I glued the ramps with a slight angle, added some styrene on the sides to fill the gap and some putty on top.
 

I will add another picture when everything is smoothed out.

  


And finally - I added the wings.  It is starting to look like a real plane and not just a collection of parts.
 

Wings and horizontal stabilizers attached.


I made a stand to avoid breaking off the horizontal stabs or the landing gear.  It will also double as a support for transporting the model.


I filled the seams with Vallejo modeling putty which is really just thick acrylic paint I think.  The nice thing is that after it dries you can smooth it down with a Q-Tip soaked in denatured alcahol so no sanding required.

  


This was exciting to discover.  I thought there were a couple of scratches in the wind screen to buff out and when I made the attempt I discovered that they were micro-cracks in the plastic.  I don't know if it because of the age/storage conditions of the kit, or if I munged it while I was buffing out the big scratch that was in it (see above post).  Both are possible I suppose but the big scratch makes me think that the damage was started already and I just made it worse with all the handling.
 

I am going to install the windscreen on the model but am going to try and get another one from Tamiya to replace it with later.


It does not look too bad from most angles but when you get the light right it looks terrible, like in the above picture.


Masked off with the Eduard canopy masks and some Tamiya tape and attached to the fuselage.  I also got the HUD in place but forgot to take a good picture.


I got the canopy attached to the frame too.  I think it looks pretty good.  There was a lot more PE to add to the canopy frame but it was so small and fiddly I threw most of it out.

  


More joy from the Verlinden ejection seats.  The Aires seats are awesome but they have no rails with them.  I figured I would use the Verlinden PE rails since they looked nice. 
 

Well - the Verlinden brass is very difficult to bend even with my Small Shop and Tamiya bending tools and the ejection rails are impossible to bend on the actual fold line.  They all wanted to bend where the cutout is on the side of the rail no matter how tightly I clamped them.  What a waste of an evening.  I ended up cutting the rails of the kit seat for one and used Evergreen channel stock for the other.  I will post pictures of them later.

  


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