1/48 Heller/Italeri F-16

VISTA Viper – The one and only NF-16D

by Ralf Pätzold

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Now, there’s tons of pictures of this cute bird on the 'net (including ARC’s Walkaround section), there’s an offering by TwoBobs giving us the required decals, but strangely, builds of this machine seem to be rare.

Well, as they say, it’s a tough job, but someone had to do it!

So, here’s my take on the VISTA program’s NF-16D. For those interested in the technical background of the aircraft, there’s an introduction on F-16.net.

This was one of those builds that sometimes just seem to happen. While shopping at the TwoBobs website, I came across the now out-of-print article 48-019, “F-16 Test Vipers”, which at the time they were blowing out for a ridiculous price, and I added it to the shopping cart planning to use it to augment the kit decals of a Heller F-16D I had in my stash.

When the set arrived, however, it turned out to be a true labour of love, and I decided on the spot to finish the Heller kit as the VISTA NF-16D.

Click on images below to see larger images

This machine, being the only one of its kind, has a number of peculiarities which could not be taken care of using kit parts. To get a totally correct representation of the real thing would have required the purchase of several aftermarket details sets plus scratchbuilding and intensive surgery. However, I decided early on to make this a quick build of something cool-looking and to live with the discrepancies (aka "non-anal mode").

The avionics spine missing from the Heller kit was acquired by ebaying an Italeri “F-16 B/D Viper” kit, since I knew the Heller and Italeri kits to be basically identical. This spine is known to be far from perfect, but hey – so is mine! As a side effect, this gave me another F-16D kit to use with one of the “spineless” options on the TwoBobs sheet ;-)

The NF-16D seems to be the only example of the Viper to sport a combination of the later big-mouth intake and the earlier P&W F100 engine, rather than vice versa. While the Heller/Italeri kits include what I would call weird approximations of both types of engine nozzles (the number of feathers on both being the arithmetic mean of the two variants), there’s only the small-mouth intake, but I decided to live with both the intake and nozzle anomalies.

Artistic licence also allowed me to ignore the fact that the real deal uses the reinforced landing gear.

Under these auspices, the build went along with no major problems. Sorry, but I am not going to regale you with the usual “Construction started with the canopy ...” stuff here - everything you ever wanted to know about Viper kits and more can already be found all over the 'net, especially on "mostly Greg's" web site.

The model was then primed and sprayed with several thin layers of Tamiya gloss white, with sanding and polishing performed religiously in between. I then came across a major stumbling block as it proved to be pretty difficult to locate any of the listed options for FS 15044 (Insignia Blue) in Berlin, but what can you expect in a city where even something as simple as a bottle of Micro Sol turns into a kind of modelling Holy Grail. No wonder everybody does their shopping on the net these days. Anyway, a sub-optimal solution presented itself in the form of a lone bottle of Model Master FS 35044 which is both enamel and flat.

Click on images below to see larger images

As expected, the decals presented no major challenges. Minor coverage problems on the wings and horizontal stabilizers are probably down to shape idiosyncrasies in the large variety of available 1/48 scale Viper kits that must be difficult to deal with for a decal manufacturer - interestingly, this TwoBobs offering does not specify any specific make of kit, nor does it include the usual “What’s out there” section listing available options. If I were to do this again, rather than touching up missing bits I would probably not bother with the wing and stabilizer decals and simply spray those areas – with all the information included with the decals, they should be easy enough to mask.

Speaking of masking, the lower front section has to be completed with a mixture of painting and decaling, and getting the two to line up is non-trivial, technically speaking.

Anyway, after some final touch-ups, detail work, and Future top coats there it was – a one-of-a-kind Viper with a paint scheme that really does justice to the elegant lines of one of the most beautiful flying machines ever designed by man.

Ralf 

Photos and text © by Ralf Pätzold