F-4J Phantom II "VF-84 Jolly Rogers" by Zoltan Pocza | |
Brand: | Hasegawa |
Scale: | 1/48 |
Review by: | Zoltan Pocza |
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Phabulous Phantom....this classic fighter generates instant emotions in almost all of the modelers of modern jets and the aviation fans in general since 1958. With its history, success, the unlimited versions and modifications made the Phan to a really loved subject for all modelers and obviously air forces as well! The jet is pretty well documented, even though there were no digital cameras that time! Its robust, but beautiful shape, the famous smoke trails inspired lots of people. For me personally the Phantom is the first real, serious and powerful jet fighter of the History. Today there are only a few flying of them, but they always generate great interest!
There are tons of Phantom models on the market, different versions from different manufacturers in almost all available scales from 1/700 to 1/32. It's been produced in many different qualities as well. Long long time ago I had a simple, unmarked low quality kit without any box or instruction sheet, it was most likely a russian copy of an older kit. That time it was the only available kit here of the Phan. These days modelers have incredible amount of option, and they can sink into ASM (Advanced Modeling Syndrome) without noticing it. It's not only that the market is full of the Phantom kits, but the aftermarket sets, the unlimited amount of decals, books and everything else you might ever need to build your most awesome model ever!
As usual with these kits, the decals are excellent in terms of quality and register accuracy. There is not much more to say about it. Markings for two units are included:
An extra instruction sheet is inserted to explain the placement of these decals, as the original instruction sheet if from an other F-4J kit (Showtime 100). It's really usual that manufacturers selling the same kit with different markings in separate boxing, sometimes even for different price! If you don't find these decals useful, you can find about one zillion aftermarket options to match your taste.
As usual we get a really clean easy to follow instruction sheet that explains everything step by step, though experience modeles rarely follow these steps as recommended. The sheet itself is for another kit, but the difference is in the decals only, and as I mentioned above there is an insert matching the included decals.
Well, even though that this kit is clearly an older design than the F/A-18F offered by the same company in this scale, but this is definitely a really good, high grade kit, and it's obviously best in it's scale! The parts breakdown shows that the engineers had to match lot of criteria to let Hasegawa produce almost all existing version of the Phan, but they have done a good job! This kit can be built up into a really nice, and attractive model with some love and efforts! Thank you for Hobby Link Japan (http://www.hlj.com) for the review sample!
Photos and text © 2009 by Zoltan Pocza January 13, 2009 |