Canopy next. First I painted clear blue onto the windscreen with a brush and then proceed to dip the parts into Future. Future will remove all the tiny scratches on the clear parts and impart a supershine onto them. It also happens to be a household floor polish heh.

After letting the canopy dry for 24 hours, it's time to start masking. Most people, when they mask, they tend to put tape all over the parts then use a sharp knife to cut out the canopy frames. I did that before with disastrous results. So I do it the long way. With tiny cut pieces of masking tape and slowly masking just the clear parts. The work is rougher and more time consuming but at least I won't have to put a knife onto the clear parts.

With this way of masking, there will definitely be some clean up work required later.

Well it rained the next day so I had to defer the 3rd color till this weekend. And this one was quickly finished up.

I must say the green is now much easier to put on than the two previous colors. I'll chalk it up to being more used to airbrushing again I guess.

Based on the reference photo, my demarcation lines are too soft. To be honest, I don't have that much confidence I can make them sharper by freehand. So after I have allowed some time for the paint to cure (mostly likely a week heh), I'll take out my bluetack and proceed to do guides so I can respray the lines.

Stay tuned.

The intakes are done. Hasegawa didn't mold the entire intake trunk. It sort of blanks off about an inch into the intake. So instead of a tunnel-like effect, you just see a wall. Well... you'd see a wall if you really peeked into it. The blank-off is just deep enough that you can't really see that the intake doesn't go forever. Nice.

The fit of the intakes however, is something else. In this case, I think Hasegawa over-engineered this part so they could crank out as many different versions of the aircraft with just one mold design. Along with the bottom/wing assembly, you'd have to adjust and re-adjust the intakes a fair bit to get the best fit. This was the best I could do. Basically, the right intake is more or less fine, but the left intake will take some puttying to fix. Oh well.

Another part that makes me scratch my head are panels on both sides of the tail which as far as I can tell, don't even exist in the real pictures of Phantoms that I've seen. The panels need to be cemented which causes some gaps no matter how I adjusted them. And I still haven't figured out what purpose these panels serve.

Following the instructions, all the necessary holes were opened to fit the antennae blades seen on the F-4J. However, I only realized I missed one after I glued the fuselage sides together. Bummer.

The F-4J I'm modeling will be Bu No. 155800 from VF-96 'Fighting Falcons', AKA 'Showtime 100'. Pilot Randall 'Duke' Cunningham and RIO Willie Driscoll would score a triple kill on this aircraft to become the only US Navy aviators to achieve 'ace' status in the Vietnam War. However, 'Showtime 100' would be shot down by a SAM after getting its third kill on that day.

This is a prominent aircraft in the history of the Phantom so I decided I needed one in my collection. Some research was done on 'Showtime 100' to make it as accurate as possible to how it appeared on that fateful day. To that end, this is what I did:

• Got a hold of Yellowhammer's (YHD72-02) Showtime 100 decal sheet. Touted as the most accurate markings of the particular aircraft in the market
  
  
• From the Hasegawa weapons sets, I got a hold of 4 x AIM-9 Sidewinders, 2 x AIM-7 Sparrows and 4x Mk.20 Rockeye cluster bombs. This was the loadout carried by 'Showtime 100' on that day
  
  
• During the war, Navy Phantoms only carried the centerline fuel tank so I left out the wing tanks and replaced them with empty bomb pylons that a good friend Maxwinamp passed to me from his Fujimi Phantom kit
  
  
• Left out the intake ECM blisters that only appeared in late F-4J variants

Lastly, I cut out all the landing gear and prep them for painting too so I can just paint everything in one shot. So now I'm all done! Next is a coat of primer and seam fixing begins! Yay...

Painting continues. Today I originally planned to repaint the light brown. But then after the sun, I noticed that... hey... the color's not that bad! Sure it lacks a bit of the reddish tone that the reference pic had, but at least it doesn't look too yellow under the sun. So I decided to leave it as is since after my planned oil wash, the light brown will tone down considerably.

So on to the second color: dark brown. This is also straight from the bottle Vallejo Model Color 'Red Brown'. While it turned out to be lighter than what I wanted, again the planned oil wash will tone down the shade.

The demarkation lines are all done freehand. Badly I might add. I really need to remaster my airbrush. As it is, the lines are really soft. More suitable for 1/35 scale. Reference photos show relatively tight demarkation lines. Not solid, just a bit soft. Grrr... looks like I will have to take out my stash of bluetack and do the demarkation lines that way.

I suck.

Anyway, hopefully I can add the final camouflage color tomorrow.

Painting commences. The camouflage I am going to do is the 'Flogger' scheme, which tries to replicate the MiG-23/27 Flogger color scheme as flown by ex-Eastern-Bloc Air Forces. Markings will be from TwoBobs' 48-001 'Fighting Fulcrum' sheet. The sheet includes a camouflage guide which I use to trace the camo pattern onto the kit with a soft pencil.

Strangely though, some of the camouflage do not match up when put onto the kit so I did some guesstimation and compromised some here and there to get the final guides done.

The weather turned out to be good. It was dry and sunny out. So on with the lightest color first. And that would be light brown. I decided to use Buff straight from the bottle. After about an hour or so of spraying, the rain clouds started gathering, which in turn turned up the humidity, which in turn cuased water to seep into my airbrush, which in turn caused it to spray water onto my kit instead of paint. Damn. Had to stop after only magaing to finishing up the bottom. Oh well.

After I was done, I compared the resulting color I got with a reference picture I got from Airliners.net. The Buff turned out to be too yellowish. Gotta figure out a way to fix it in the next session.

While I know that colors of the real aircraft differs in each photo, I think mine differs way too much to be excused heh.

I say. This project has been ongoing (mostly off) for almost 3 years! Who would have thunk. Time sure flies. Anyhow, before I get bitched to death by my friends who know about this project, I decided I really have to finish this one. So anyhow, I still don't have a proper workdesk, but I lugged my compressor to the porch and started spraying on the steps. And here's what I got so far after an hour.

There's still some mistakes here and there but I thought, what the heck. I have to finish this quickly or it'll forever in my Projects list.

I must say it's quite fun to finally be able to airbrush again. I was very rusty though. Just look at the left wing which was where I started. The preshade's very roughly done. Normally my preshades are quite roughly done, but this one is really quite bad heh. By the time I got to the right wing though, I was starting to get the hang of controlling my double action airbrush again. Hopefully tomorrow the weather will hold. Then can slap on the camouflage colors!

ONWARD HO!