Recently Completed: Fujimi 1:72 F-86F (Kit No. F-18)

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, August 1977, sourced from a photograph, a fairly plain scheme which obviated messing on with masking for colour trim. The black and yellow stripes on the Sidewinders came from the Hasegawa US missile set (X72-3), though I used the Fujimi missiles.

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