1/32 Hasegawa F-5N Tiger II

Gallery Article by Terry Chan on Sept 28 2011

 

The F-5N is the version of the Northrop Tiger II that the US Navy uses as aggressor jets. The kit is Hasegawa's F-5E with "with shark nose" that came with VFC-13 decals. I found the beautiful TwoBobs VFC-111 Sundowners decal sheet, so I used it instead of the kit's decals. I also threw in the Verlinden resin cockpit set.

Personally, I dislike kits with raised panel lines. I almost never build those kits, but since I really wanted a Sundowners jet, and the F-5E is relatively small, I decided to rescribe the whole kit. I used my trusty Trimaster scribing templates, as well as the Hasegawa curve line templates for the scribing task. The raised lines were sanded down slightly, then were used as guides for the templates and the scriber. I didn't have a riveter back then, so the rivets at the jet exhaust were done by a pin vise - yes, rivet by rivet. The scribing took several nights of (very tedious) work, but I felt it was absolutely needed in order to bring this kit up to modern standards.

 

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The Verlinden resin cockpit came with both resin and PE parts for the cockpit as well as the gun chamber. The gun chamber parts were not used because well, the F-5N is gunless. The resin cockpit offers marginal improvement over the kit cockpit. Where the Verlinden really shines is the complex canopy raising mechanism. Unfortunately the instructions were the worst I have ever dealt with. In fact, it was almost next to useless. Fortunately, I have DACO's T-38 book (the T-38 is very similar to the F-5) that I could use as a reference on building the canopy lifting parts.

The 3-tone camouflage was done with Gunze acrylics, and was sprayed free-hand. Using the TwoBobs instruction sheet as a guide, I traced the outline of each colour with a fine tip airbrush. Then I switched to a wider tip and filled in the colours. Weathering was kept to a minimal because this is a land based jet.

The finished model looks very good in outlines. I thought the camouflage goes quite well with the flashy tail graphic. The rescribing was a drag, but I'm glad I did it.

Terry Chan

      

Photos and text © by Terry Chan