WIP Mitsubishi F-2A Black Panther

This is the one that I hope to achieve in 1/48 scale.. 

Using the kit’s seat and add a few simple details. The seat (and tub) is big compared to Eduard’s Aces II and Tamiya’s F-16C. Will add a pilot because of the in-flight model. 

For the best connection between the two intake halves, I had to tilt the rear end up a bit. This was just because I did the ‘filling way’ first which didn’t turned out well for the front intake part. So after cleaning up, I airbrushed the front part and kept the rear part with the thicker layer of acrylic paint which caused a little step. That’s why I lifted the rear a bit. 

Moving on, in daylight the blue is brighter.. 

Little bit of detailing wat will be fairly visible. 

Used some decals of Airscale. Need a bit of touch up on the white knobs around the MFD’s (as always it’s a tough job of getting these square knobs painted.) 

Sometimes I look around on the DCS site, great detailed sim cockpits when you just don’t have that specific angle of a look into the cockpit  

Look at this blue compared to the next picture…
Here the light blue is quite rich with maybe a very little bit of green and grey. 

Here is it is a ‘washed’ light blue and in my opinion not the right one to compare the paint with. 

A test on a white primer, will take a grey primer and add some drops blue and light grey. 

Tried to get the right light blue for the base color with mixing some Tamiya paints. (I have also the so called dedicated set of 3 paints from mr color, but the dark blue and the light blue are too dark and the light blue has the wrong tint to my eyes, the grey-white for the nose comes very close on the other hand.) 

Hm, on the spine there is a difference between kit and the serial nr that I want to build so need to adjust the blade shaped antenna and attach a flat round antenna (ecm warning receiver?) in the middle. The blade antenna is right for the serials in the kit and both setups are in use, but both need the flat round antenna between light and blade antenna 

Here only one bigger blade antenna in the instructions. 

I switched to Mr Color, grey primer, then as base a mix of color 34, 74 and 374. It turns out a nice blue with a shade of grey. I’ll stick with this, had to make a choice to go on with it. 

Made some more to scale front fins of the AAM-4 (at right) with evergreen plasticard and thinned the rear ones. Out of the weaponset these are way too thick. I chose the kit’s AAM-3. The AAM-3’s in the Hasegawa JASDF Weaponset is strangely enough thicker, for sure not better in detail and a touch out of scale.
One of each more to make.. 

AAM-3 

AAM-4 (upgraded version) 

Example of the use of both missiles (here with the older AAM-4 / Sparrow) 

Wings with pylons, flaps and slats and the vertical stabilizer attached. (Out of the box the sharp front end of the tailbase was snapped off….) 

Nr 508 has a bit different layout of the darker seablue camouflage compared to the Hase instructions… 

Mixing C375 and C5 

Got the blues, but I’m going to adjust the darker blue, needs a bit more mr color 375 and a bit more coverage. 

Darker blue adjusted and tail already back in black.
Hard to get it on the photo, but no photoshopping here, really painted over with a slightly more mr color 375 in the mix. 

Some preparation for adding colors.
The decals of the slime lights of both Hasegawa and DXM are yellow; when looking at photos, they are bright white in appearance. It also seems that the walk/don’t walk lines are for 90 % white, in the kit they look almost pale gold and DXM has designed them all light grey. I think Fine Molds did a better job here on the 1-72 scale.