Hasegawa 1/48 scale
Mitsubishi F-1

by Pierpaolo Maglio
 

HyperScale is proudly supported by Squadron

This is my Hasegawa 1/48 scale Mitsubishi F-1.

The kit is very good and builds up quite nicely, detail is much, much better than the old Fujimi kit.

By the way even in this new tooled kit I found some fitting problem. The air scoops are very complicated pieces made of several parts that didn’t fit together easily. Interior detail of the air scoops is also very bad and several sink marks need to be sanded flat.

Since I notice that this plane has always the slats lowered when on ground, I choose to cut them from the kit wing leading edge. I also added a resin seat by Aconuaga. The kit’s seat in not that bad, but, you know, a good resin one really add something to every jet kit. To the lowe part of the canopy I added some small PE pieces token from the PE set designed (for the Fujimi kit) by my friend Luois (I build this kit around Easter 2005 when Plats and Eduard PE sets were still to come).

To paint it I used Gunze acrylics since these are the only one with correct JASF shades. The kit was painted with my new Aztek 480 metal airbrush using the fine tan nozzles and a few pieces of paper as a guide. After the 4 colours of the camouflage I spryed a good coat of Future to seal the paint and prepare it for decals. For a couple of weeks all went well, then the Future spryed over the tan colour cracked all over. Nothing happened overt he two greens or the undersurface grey but all the Future need to be removed from over the tan paint. I made that using very fine wet’n dry paper and then restore the area with Tamiya clear gloss. Now I know (thank to the many Hyperscalers that told me) to never use Future over Gunze paint, even if it still works on some glossy paints but really not over the flat tan.

I have several pictures of Mitsubishi F-1 that is one of my favourite jet and I want to make it as one from 3°Hikotai with shark mouth as shown during bombing exercises Senkyo in mid ‘80s.

The decals for the shark mouth come from the Fujimi kit, but as soon as the decals were on I realized I was making a mistake. In the ‘80s the F-1 still have the framed windshield as the one used on the T-2, while the Hasegawa kit only gives you the post Mid Life Upgrade al clear windshield. Using the piece from the Fujimi was impossible: too wrong in shape and too thick so I ordered from Hasegawa a the clear parts from the T-2 kit and used that windshield on my F-1.

With the decals dry I sprayed a final coat of flat paint of  Polly Scale Flat and my F-1 was finished.

Since the Senkyo meeting are just for training I choose to add only training rounds to my jet.

I really hope you like it.

 

Click the thumbnails below to view larger images:

Images and Text Copyright © 2006 by Pierpaolo Maglio
Page Created 29 March, 2006
Last Updated 29 March, 2006

Back to HyperScale Main Page