Feature article by Patrick Spitaels
A note from Geoff
We are very lucky to have this impressive Hasegawa F-4J Phantom from VF-84 1:48 in ‘maintenance mode’ contribution from Pat Spitaels – when I saw it for the first time I said ‘Wow!’ out loud and you can see why! I have included a few photos right here at the start to whet your appetite. So, lots to look forward to and we’ll cover all the work in the forthcoming updates.
My plan!
Is it still necessary to present VF-84 and its F-4J Phantom II? Perhaps not as it has been covered so many times before in kit form and nothing very new in fact ,this squadron is one of the most covered in the plane-modelers’ community!
I’m a fan of the ‘Bones’, so I finally decided to make something different with their planes! The idea, well… showing one of their aircraft set in a scene around it rather than showing a row of planes on the model tables!
I first started with the new DEMON they flew and for this one of the ideas was to build something a bit more difficult – I always love to open panels to show what’s inside and the idea was to show it in maintenance!
The new VAGABOND decal sheet was just released and so I decided this was the way to go!
References
The first job was to search references, the F-4 is pretty well shown in books, let’s start with the new RED AIR Publication from Jakes MELAMPY, talking about the USAF F-4 but showing lots of opened panels with great pictures! Then there’s the DACO book, about the Naval versions of the F-4, loads of interesting pics here too! Also they have the different squadrons covered.