I’ve only done two Sabres previously – the Airfix F-86D when
I was a kid, and the Matchbox F-86A at a teenager. The Sabre is a very elegant
and impressive plane, historically and technically important, and surprisingly
long-lived – I was not really aware of the fact at the time, but there were
Sabres still flying with several countries, in secondary roles, certainly, at
the beginning of the 1980s. This example, as befits a Japanese kit, is a
Mitsubishi-built Sabre, distinguished by the small engine bay intake on the
right rear fuselage.
This is only my third completed Fujimi kit, the others being
their Ju-87 G-2 Stuka and A-7A Corsair II, in the same scale. It was quite a
fun build but their engineering leaves a bit to be desired, creating problems
of alignment – all around parts fit was nothing to write home about, and did
the instruction to add nose weight have
to be in Japanese? The parts look good in the box – also very familiar, I built
a Hobbycraft F-86E many years ago, part of a conversion project which is still
incomplete, and it’s quite obviously the Fujimi kit reboxed. The kit features
excellent recessed detail, deep enough to take a wash and hold it, but the
separate gun panels are a pain, as the fit is far from exact. They were tooled
separately to facilitate swapping out for camera nose parts on the RF-86, an
example of stretching the mould applicability at cost of builder ease.
Likewise, the air brakes can be posed open, and do not fit as precisely as they
should for the closed option.
Nevertheless, the kit builds quite well. It features the unslatted “6-3” wing, a pair of AIM-9B Sidewinders and pylons, and a choice of raised instrument details or decals. The decals would never lie down over the 3D detail, so drybrushing was used to bring out the instruments. The instrument decals were also far from crisp depictions.
The decal sheet provides sets of individual numbers so you
can build any F-86 in the fleet (except the 500-series serials on the RF birds),
though this invites alignment problems in the tail codes and makes for a lot
more work. I chose a bird from No. 8 Squadron, Komaki AB
Speaking of the decals, they were very matte, took their
time separating from the backing sheet, and during the softening time exuded a
milky goop I can only assume is the decal adhesive as it resembled nothing so
closely as PVA whiteglue. I wiped away the majority and the decals adhered
perfectly with what remained. The decals overall behaved better than I feared
they might, so I’m inclined to give the kit sheets a go in more Fujimi outings
of similar vintage.
I used my standard approach to painting metallic finishes, Tamiya
XF-16 Flat Aluminium, overcoated with Microscale Satin, but resisted the
impulse to use graphite to create panel variation as these birds seem to have
been in metallic paint rather than natural metal, and were well-maintained,
therefore clean and tidy. No weathering was applied to this model. The gun
panels were probably stainless steel and always look darker, so graphite was
used for this effect.
There are a few errors and omissions – joint lines needed
more work, nothing shows up defects like metallics! Joints I would have sworn
were perfect, adzed, then milled with wet 1200-grade paper, showed up hairline
gaps under paint. Also, the fit of the jet intake pipe is not perfectly
centralised and thus does not line up well with the nose part, necessitating
work with a round rat-tail file in the intake to try to minimise the mis-match.
I had tried chocking the fit with styrene shims, but it needed more. Next time
I do a Fujimi Sabre I’ll know what to look out for. Same with the weight to
keep her from being a tail-sitter, it should be superglued behind the gun
panels, but the bird was finished before I noticed “3g” among the Japanese
script and realised it was telling me to weight the nose. Two grams turned out
to be enough, and the crushed lead shot is in fact simply lying deep in the
intake trunk.
I mis-cued on masking in the wheel well, calling for brush
touch-ups (in FS 34102, it seems North American used a green darker than
Interior Green/Zinc Chromate for their gear bays on both major lineages of the
Sabre). At the end of the day some details were left unpainted – a tiny black
panel on the tail plane, plus the radome of the radar gunsight, because, with
the rest of the model finished, I simply did not trust my wobbly hands to spot
in that detail, especially with the brushing characteristics of Tammy acrylics.
Risk spoiling the job at the last moment? I don’t think so!
I have a couple more E and F Sabres from Fujimi in my stash,
and a couple of the Airfix tooling from several years ago, in the guise of the
Canadair Sabre Mk. 4, to play with. I hope to line up a representative
selection of Sabres in time, detailing the colourful schemes and range of
variation among this milestone fighter’s thousands of examples.
On the bench in the not too distant future will be the
Italeri F-100 Super Sabre, wearing Superscale decals and featuring a variegated
metal finish.
Cheers, Mike Adamson
