Greetings all.
I pulled out an old Testors 1/72 F-5E -- a kit which I must have built a full squadron's worth of, over the years -- intending to do a simple build of one of the included kit schemes, an early Navy 'Top Gun' aircraft. But that wayward and seductive siren of all modelers...'la Interneta'...beckoned me mysteriously Eastward, and I soon found myself captivated by a completely different, eye-grabbing scheme: a sweet tiger-striped bird from the Taiwanese (Republic of China) Air Force.
This F-5E and at least one two-seater F-5F (some sources say two) were specially-decorated for an Open House Day at Chihhang (Taitung) Air Base in 2018, celebrating the 7th Flight Training Wing, which serves as an advanced jet transition unit to prepare ROCAF pilots to fly 3rd- and 4th-generation front-line fighters and attack aircraft.
Kit was built pretty much straight, with the addition of a few PE details for the cockpit from an old Eduard 'Zoom' set. Externally, the boxing of the kit I possessed already had the leading edge root extensions required; a few scraps of styrene and a bit of putty served to reshape the old-style 'pointy' radome to the flattened 'platypus' nose sported by newer marks of the venerable 'Tiger II.'
Convenient straight-on (and reasonably high-def) online shots of the tail art and the characteristic stenciled 'Chung Chen' nose marking let me make my own decals for those items; the kit sheet supplied the Taiwanese roundels, and fuselage numbers came from an old AeroMaster sheet. Paints were mixes of Tamiya acrylics, with the darker grey shot first...then the stripes masked with Silly Putty...and the lighter grey sprayed over that.
Load-out is the same one carried for the Open House: a pair of AIM-9X Sidewinders...two Maverick missiles...and what looks like a travel pod, decorated with the shield badge of the unit's 44th TFS.
Hope you enjoy the photos!