1/32 Hasegawa F/A-18A Hornet Blue Angels |
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Gallery Article by Greg Vasiloff |
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This is my latest
model that I have been working on since January. I have always wanted to
do this kit up as a Blue Angels jet. I am pursueing to be a Naval Aviator
after colloge and ROTC so this choice was a natural one. As you might
know, this kit is actually a YF-18 prototype aircraft and requires a lot of
modification to be a production F-18A. I had seen that there was an "XTRAPARTS"
resin kit to fixt the prodution additions to the aircraft but was unable to
locate one. I finnaly resorted to doing all of the mods from scratch after
reading an article on this very kit from "Fine Scale Modeler Iss. May
1991". I have nver spent more than a week on a model before and do
not even own an airbrush, so this has been my biggest modeling project ever
(hey, I'm only 19 and at college at Embry-Riddle in Daytona).
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I chose to make the
model gear-up like most pilots prefer, such as myself, and made a display base
for it using wood from a craft shop and squadron patch and navy wings that I
bought on-line. The smoke is made from holloween spiderweb stuff that I
simply streched over a dowel that goes through the tailpipe of the aircraft.
It was a last minute idea and covered up the dowel nicely.
Some of the mods that I did from
scratch were: Fill the LEX slots, fill the dog-tooth edge of the stabilators,
cut off the dog-tooth on the main wings, reshaped the cheek weapon stations,
added antena bumps under the engine intakes, added vents near the nose gear
doors, added correct radar antena and fuel dump bumps on the vertical stabs, and
added a few more vents under the fuselage (seen in black) neer the main gear
doors. I alos wanted to have a pilot so I took the kit's figure which was modeed
in the standing up position and cut off the arms and legs and re-positioned them
with glue and putty. I also took his helmit and fitted it to his head only
after cutting everything off his head but his face. I made the visor from
scrap sprue.(whew!) All of these were done with nothing more than a sharp
knife and some white puddy.
For painting, I
used Testors Dark Blue and ModelMaster Bright Yellow spray bottles. It was
only luck that that the yellow from the decals matched the paint.The decals are
from CAMDecals and worked very well. My only complaint is that the large
"U.S. NAVY" decals for the under side of the wing looked too big when
compared to actual photos. With some fidgeting, I got them to look o.k.
and acceptable. Just as I finnaly finished this kit, Academy comes out
with a new 1/32 Hornet! That kit would have been a lot easier to modify.
Total hours on this bird 250+ hours and won 3rd place at a local model show.
Greg Vasiloff
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