Canadair Cf-5A, 1/48 Kinetic kit

I have had this kit for some time now and decided that I should get it "on the go" so I brought it out to work with me.
It all looks very nice, good level of detail, the cockpit detail looks better to the eye than it looks on these photos.

This kit comes with decals for 16 aircraft from 6 Airforces!
Canada x 3
Greece x 5
Norway x 2
Netherlands x 2
South Vietnam x 1
USA x 3






The fuselage has a horrible looking parts breakdown, might be some joint problems there!



A dry fitting  looks ok but we will see


Assembly of the extreme rear fuselage


Engine nozzels fitted ok but will need a good cleanup


Rear fuselage assembled, the fit was ok, I got a bit of seam to cleanup on the spine which I have done and was quite easy because the plastic is soft.

I got a not so good seam on the lower right sight of the fuselage as you can see in this pic, hopefully an easy fix, the other side was fine.

The shrapnal hole in the middle of the tail fin I made last moment as I was glueing the whole lot together when I noticed the instructions showed some small parts to be inserted there only to discover later that I won't be using those parts so I need to fill and sand that hole too.

The basic cockpit colour is done and I have sanded the lower fuselage join and the hole in the tail fin so she is starting to look better now.



The sunken areas for the panels in the forward and rear fuselage are deeper than their inserts so some careful work is need to get them flush.
The panels are not a great fit either so some filling and sanding will be needed.








The photo etch is a "Kinetic" set that I had bought seperately and was actually manufactured for Kinetic by Eduard.
I struggled a bit with the fiddly bits and the cockpit paintwork needs some tidying up but it does look nice to the naked eye.
There are a lot more photo etch bits to add to the cockpit but this is as far as I am for now.

One snag is that now that I have the photo etch attached to the main instrument panel, the upper part of the front fuselage does not fit properly so I will need to do some trimming.
I will try take better quality pics of the cockpit to post here later as the low quality of these make everything in the cockpit look like they have jagged edges.

Tidy cockpit bub!!

Very nicely done!

Thanks Snowey, its the photo etch that makes it look good.

After some trimming of the photo etch main instrument panel I got an okayish fit on the front fuselage and finished the major fuselage parts assembly..
I will need to do a bit of filling and sanding on the fuselage.




Here is a clearer photo of the cockpit.

I'm generally anti-cockpit as most of mine are barely visible when completed, but yours is real nice, professionally done and attractive.

Excellent work.


Ken

Yeah, that is the issue with cockpits....

You put a heck of a lot of work into them and they are totally obscured and nobody an really appreciate the work that has gone into creating it!

But, when you can actually "look in" and see the detail, then its all worth it!

Yup that pit looks incredible Greg. That fuselage assembly looks wicked! Is it me or is the surface detail on the kit really bad?

Thanks fella's.

Jug's the panel lines are a bit soft, I am hoping that they will look ok under a coat of cammo.

I finally got round to filling in the seams around the fuselage inserts and sanded them down.
I will have some re-scribing to do.





Then the next problem arose...the wing tip tanks are "handed" and the kit gives you two left hand tiptanks, so the right tank must be turned upsidedown...but then the wingtip does not fit the aerofoil shaped cutout in the tank properly.
So I modified it all to fit as best I could.
This is where I am at the moment.

Jeez Greg that kit seems to put up a good fight but you are beating it down.

Ja been really struggling a bit but I just have to keep on going I guess...

So I added the air intake assemblies, not too difficult but I got a bad gap in the one intake/ fuselage join.



As you can see, the collection of panel joins under the fuselage is not to good.

I used liberal amounts of glue in this area to ensure strong joints because I will have to do some filling, sanding and scribing in this area to get it looking ok.
The wings are not glued in place, just clipped in place to help align everything as best I can.

Struggling to get this photo loaded, I will try upload it later

Finally got some photos loaded into photobucket so here are some updates.

I used a lot of glue in this area to ensure strong joints, the wings are not glued, they were just in place to help hold everything in the correct position.
Before...


After sanding, now to rescribe the lost detail














I still have some cleaning up to do.

Getting along just fine there Sailor!