And here they are, in all of their glory, or not.
The Heller F-94B has a few minor issues, it has no fuel drains at the back end, the canopy is a single piece, the radar scope is set in the in use position, the gun ports aren't opened, and there's no gear bay detail at all. Despite that, I made it into a decent kit, and included the AN/ARN-6 Radio Compass inside the canopy. I also opened the canopy and chopped the radar scope to be in the ground position. I'd also like to see some afterburner detail for this kit. It's too bad that no ones made a photo etch or resin set for it. The on KW unit to have decals is the one that both Doc Win and I used. I'm sure that he'll agree, this is one of the most poorly done sets I've ever seen. The instructions are incorrect in several ways, the USAF markings are too small, and they only give you port side no walk markings! Enough for three kits, and not a single one of them is for the Starboard wing. I trashed one in the process and then snatched some from an F-80 set.
Overall, not a horrible build. Very basic, both in design and detail, this is definitely a kit that's long in the tooth and shows it. Frog originally designed it in the late fifties/early sixties, it was re-leased in the US by AMT, and then Heller bought the molds when AMT switched to ERTL/ESCI for products following the demise of Frog/Novo. Did you get all that, a quiz comes later... The cockpit is incredibly basic, but does have control panels and sticks. This is the only the second kit of this build that I've done that had pilots, so I used them! Ther' is an absolute minimum of pretend detail in the gear bays, none of it accurate, and the main gear is incredibly fiddly and thin. I was surprised that I never broke one of them! One of the peculiarities of the F-80/T-33 is the strange fit of the tail. Both this kit and the Gran Kit had a weird panel line seem and included the vertical fin with one side of the fuselage. It was very difficult to fill and caused many issues. I used Superscale decals and was danged glad that i always spray at least a single coat of clear gloss over the decals. THIN!!! Eventually everything went on satisfactorily, one of the intersting side notes is that nearly all of the F-80 units had one or two T-33's as liaison/hacks/spotters and the buzz number designation didn't change from the FT to anything else because it was considered a TF-80 at the time.
Oh, heck... This thing was horrid. I should've forked out the money for a Sword kit. In many ways a knock off of the uber useless Airfix kit, it does have a few slightly interesting additions: Gear bay detail, control panel, accurate seat, dropped flaps, and decals that are worth a dang. It's made with an incredibly soft, almost translucent, white plastic. There is flash all over! I felt at times like I was building a vacuform kit. The kit includes both standard and Misawa tanks as well as two bombs. The decals are nice, thick enough to be put on without 2 coats of clear gloss, they're fairly accurate, the fit is acceptable, and they snugged down just great with Micro-sol. The only thing to watch out for on the decals is that the wing do not walk areas are not a thin enough line and don't say "DO NOT WALK" anywhere on them. The fit of the intakes is pathetic, and the fit of the wings to fuselage needed nearly an 1/8th of an inch hacked off of the inside of each wing. This one's getting a serious DO NOT BUY from this modeler...
Heller's RT/T-33 kit is currently out of production and quite hard to find. I ended up paying about $18.00 [USD] plus shipping for mine. It's the easiest way to make a recce bird from a Shooting Star. Wonderful interior detail! The only thing missing was the radio compass that sits on top of the recce gear in the back seat. Neither the standard nor the recce nose fit entirely well. I followed the instructions and glue the nose together before attaching it to the fuselage (easier to install nose weight). If I were to build this kit over, I think I'd do it so that I glued each have to the fuselage halves first. Very little flash, easy assembly, straightforward and no issues. I was a little disappointed that ther wer no clear inserts for the camera glass. I was also disappointed because my canopy had a flaw in the top center of it! A big white streak that was inside the plastic and was not a stress mark. I've talked to a few people and the conclusion is that it might be tiny bubbles. I ended up putting layers of clear gloss over flat black to fill the indents for the glass. As I couldn't find any easy markings for a recce group with RF-80's/RT-33's I went with the markings from an F-80 unit. Maybe I'm wrong, but it wouldn't surprise me to find out that some of the units had these birds for post strike BDA.
I'v3 learned a lot by doing this set as a minigroup build of my own. I've got three more that I can do like this: F-84's by Tamiya, Heller and Academy; F-86's by Matchbox, Fujimi, Frog, and Academy; and MiG-15's by Hobby Boss, Academy, and KP. It's just as much fun learning how to do things differently and learning how different manufacturers tackle problems as it is building and displaying the kits.
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Andy Hill (the_draken) landrew.hill(at)live.com <*> ASE Master Auto Tech, Imaca certified. >^.^<
PADI OWSI Certified, BA Poli Sci (NDSU), BS Secondary ED-Social Studies MSUM (Sigma *** Laude)