Fujimi 1/72 F-4G Phantom

A couple of years ago I bought a Fujimi F-4G via Evil bay and although I would have preferred the Hasegawa kit, it has been out of production for years and fetch stupid prices when they appear on auction sites. Mind you Fujimi F-4’s are not that cheap either so when I saw this, I made a bid for it even though I knew it was damaged and won the kit for £10 UK.

The damage was quite severe to say the least;

The starboard fuselage was completely severed however most importantly all the bits were there. The idea was to try and repair the damage but if it didn’t work out, I was going to use various bits from the kit and stick them on an Italeri F-4E that had just been re-released at the time.

After seeing that a Phantom-related decal sheet has just been released (Caracal 1/72 RF-4C’s but that will be another blog post), I was actually thinking of building an RF-4C but when looking at the Hannants website to see what aftermarket was available, I saw Reskit exhausts for the F-4G so that drew me back to the Fujimi kit I got two years ago.

Yesterday I got the kit out of the stash to see if it was a worthwhile project and the repairs were pretty good to the fuselage and fuel tanks so I’ve decided to have a go at it. The Fujimi Phantoms were not THAT bad but the main criticism was about the panel lines as they are quite fine but apparently don’t hold a wash very well. I thought that I could rescribe them to make the panel lines deeper so starting with the undersides of the wing I did just that, unfortunately the plastic is quite hard and the rescribing didn’t make that much difference to the depth so I’ll leave it as is;

So we’ll go from there and this will probably be yet another ongoing project that will be revisited from time to time. Funny thing is I have a at least seven or eight other F-4 kits in the stash yet the last one I built was back in the 80s (the Fujimi 1/72 F-4C) so I really should address the lack of Phantoms on the shelf.

Edit; a couple of hours later and it took some doing due to warpage but the fuselage is together along with the wings;

I’ll leave this to set for a day or so. I also figured out that the Aries cockpit can be fitted after so with a little bit of trimming, especially for the instrument shroud under the windscreen it goes in quite nicely, even if it was designed for the Hasegawa kit.