Tamiya 1/32 F-16CJ
By Frank Daniels
This is Tamiya's 1/32 F-16CJ kit, built as a line jet from the 55th FS during Operation Nothern Watch, Incirlik AB, Turkey. Decals used were Afterburner Decals, as well as a few stencils from Two Bobs. The missile decals were mostly Two Bobs, with a few kit decals where TB missed some. I used the ordnance provided in the kit- 2x AGM-88 HARM missiles, 2x AIM-9M Sidewinders, 2x AIM-120C AMRAAMS, the HTS pod, as well as a modified An/ALQ-184 ECM pod. The ECM pod is a cut down version of the one provided in the kit to represent their 2 band pods used in theater. I would like to extend a huge thank you to Jake Melampy and Pete Fleischmann for their invaluable help regarding technical aspects of the F-16 as well as great advice on ordnance - THANK YOU BOTH!!!
As always, there are a few things I will do differently next time, some of those are things I did one way on the first one and differently this time. Also there are things which did not work so well either time LOL! This time around, I used the Aires resin exhaust set - what a huge difference! Of course, I couldn't do that on the first one as it has a Pratt and Whitney engine (different exhaust) and Aires do not make such an item yet. I also used some .5mm stainless tubing for the static whip housings, and stretched sprue for the whips. This looks MUCH better than than the .5mm stainless rods Tamiya gives you. I cannot take credit for coming up with this idea - I read about it in Reid Air Publishing's "Building the Scale Viper" in a build by our own Geedubelyer. If you have never seen his build of this kit, it is by far the best example of this kit I have ever seen. The only other additions are some wiring for the landing gear, a few small scratchbuilt additions in the cockpit like the canopy lock (very noticeable in it's absence) and some wiring for the canopy opening mechanism. Otherwise, it's out of the box. Paints were all by Tamiya. Thank you for looking in, and I would love to hear any feedback and constructive criticism!
There is a build thread for this model in the LSP forums.
© Frank Daniels 2012
This article was published on Saturday, November 24 2012; Last modified on Tuesday, April 12 2016