Thunderbirds F-84F Thunderstreak...
This has been a long time coming! I think I've worked on this kit for six months off and on. The build wasn't so bad. Italeri's 1/72 scale F-84F. It was the decals. I've been wanting to do a Thunderbirds jet for quite some time and this F-84 kit provided the opportunity. I used everything in the box except the landing gear and the pilot seat. The kit even provided a display stand. I like that. I posed the jet in flight. The construction was the fuselage, then the wings, then the drop tanks. Nothing was attached until after decaling and the final clear coat. Painting and doing the decals was easier to do before final assembly, especially the tail and the nose decals.
The inside of the canopy is painted black because there is no interior. Of course the airplane is over-all bare metal: Alclad II Aluminum. The rest of the paint, the wing tips and tail are Model Master enamels. The decals. Yeah, the decals. The national insignia are Techmod. The color and registration on Techmod decals is always good, it's just that the decals are a little brittle. Sometimes they'll split and break while being put into place. The rest of the decals are old Microscale Thunderbird decals. They were a challenge. I usually have pretty good luck with old Microscale decals but this time was different. The one color decals, the black lettering and the blue stars were pretty delicate, breaking pretty easily. The red scallops on the tail and the red, white and blue on the nose were really brittle, breaking and shattering at the slightest touch. It was a real effort to get them into place. The decals took a very heavy application of Solvaset to get them to hunker down. After the decals set, touch up was done with MM Guards Red Acryl, a pretty good match for the red in the decals.
I am proud of the build. It's no trophy winner but it looks good on the shelf and my wife likes it because it's colorful. I might try another Thunderbird down the road. Maybe an F-100 Thunderbird. In the meantime, I'll shut up. Enjoy. Oh yeah, comments welcome.