1/48 Classic Airframes F-5B

Gallery Article by Patrick Vossenberg on Apr 17 2018

 

      

Here is my 'Greek Ghost', built using the Classic Airframes F-5B. The kit comes with some nice resin parts for the cockpit, wheel wells and exhausts. Being a limited run kit though, it takes considerable fitting, filling, sanding and rescribing to have all these parts to fit properly. The fuselage and wing parts are all a bit rough: practically the entire airframe was rescribed, as quite some panel lines were shallow and inconsistently engraved. The very convincing ejection seats come without any seat belts, so I sourced these from the spares box. Lastly, I spruced up the landing gears, by adding a bit of detail and wiring.

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I finished my F-5B in Hellenic Air Force colors: the ghost scheme from the '90s. Humbrol enamels were used for the main colors, but these were tweaked considerably to give the aircraft a weary and faded look - as reference pictures of Greek F-5's typically show. I included an in-progress picture (no. 16 below) to show how I proceeded: top left shows the pre-shading with dark gray on main panel lines while other areas were sprayed with blue and desert yellow tones; top right shows the camo (Humbrol 126, 129 and 140 straight from the bottle) applied in thin layers; bottom right and lastly bottom left shows the process of colour fading and blending everything together. 

Alclad II shades were used for the exhaust area and wheel wells/landing gear. Panel line washes with enamels and oil washes in different colors were used in the weathering process. Markings for this aircraft are from an Icarus Decals sheet.

Enjoy the photos.

Patrick Vossenberg

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Photos and text © by Patrick Vossenberg