#f-4ej

F-4EJ Phantom II, JASDF

Hasegawa 1:72 F-4EJ JASDF Phantom II plastic model build photo set August 1st, 2020

This is the old Hasegawa Phantom kit, first released in 1972. So this year I have finished three of these legacy kits: the F-14, F-15, and now this F-4 (you can find these builds in my Tumblr stream). Hasegawa continues to repop these old kits with raised panel lines and they are rather cheap to build. They do have flaws, but despite their age they come together fairly easily.

This is the oldest of the three of these kits, and the seat was the most inaccurate. I used metal wires to spruce up the detail and I actually used the pull rings from Hasegawa’s updated Phantom kit (the tooling is from 1990).

The painting was rather easy: the top is Mr. Color 315 and the underside is 316. The only tricky part was the trapezoidal panels at the base of either wing where those decals go down. I cut the decals out very tightly, used them as a template, and taped around those templates to get the shape. I saved the decals for later and then sprayed Mr. Color 25, Dark Sea Gray. This gave me the shape I needed. Then I masked off that area I’d painted and then proceeded with the main top color, 315. Then after I’d put the gloss coat down, I then applied those decals properly and they fit the shape just fine.