with Wolfpack Designs resin seats
NSAWC, US Navy, USA 2009
I acquired this kit simply for the decals to use on my Hasegawa F-16A kit, and as such had no intention to actually build this model, since its reputation proceeded it. And its reputation is not good.
However, I don’t like waste and I couldn’t decide whether I preferred the blue or brown scheme on the single-seater, and so I decided to build the Kinetic one as a two-seater in the blue scheme. This boxing can be built as either a single or twin-seater.
The only aftermarket I used was a pair of resin seats from Wolfpack, that are not great but better than those in the kit, and a leftover Eduard Brassin nose wheel I had to replace the rather poorly moulded kit example.
Poor moulding is characteristic of the whole kit. Ejector marks and towers are everywhere. The moulded detail is wide and shallow, and the surface texture across the entire kit is unacceptably rough. The kit comes with parts moulded in two different shades of grey, which makes me wonder if there are two generations of moulding, since the darker coloured parts are marginally better than the paler ones.
What is particularly striking about this kit is how awful the instructions are – easily the worst I have ever come across in a mainstream kit. In case you’re also making this model, let me highlight some of the problems:
- If you follow the instructions for the two-seater, you will find you have joined the fuselage halves without inserting the main undercarriage bay. Do not do this.
- Kinetic would have you fit the nose panel with the bird-slicer IFF aerials. Do not do this. (They helpfully point out that this part is for a Block 50 F-16, which of course, an A/B is not…) The correct part is elsewhere on the sprues.
- Kinetic have you use a fuselage panel (B17) under the right side of the canopy. I could not see this anywhere on photos of the F-16B I was making. Fortunately, the panel has a horrible fit, so the whole lot can just be obliterated with Milliput.
- Step 10 shows the airbrakes being modelled open. I did not want to do this, but if I had, I could not find the parts marked ‘7 4 D’ which allegedly makes this option possible.
- Step 11 inexplicably mentions the Netherlands, Norwegian, Belgian and Danish air forces in connection with optional parts. Ignore part C11.
- The main intake has navigation lights mounted on moulded pedestals. These pedestals should not be present and so I removed them by sanding them off. Furthermore, the lights are too high up the intake side. I did not notice this until decalling.
- Kinetic get the main wheels muddled up. Use G9, not G10.
- This kit only has the landing lights mounted in the nose gear door. This is inappropriate for an early F-16 and so parts C28 and Z11 should be ignored. Sadly, Kinetic do not include parts for the lights to be fitted on the main gear legs as they should be.
- Kinetic would have you build completely the wrong tail. I believe the instructions are for European F-16s with the parachute housing. The correct parts can be found on the sprues.
- Ignore the instructions to fit the antennae to the wing leading edges.
- The words ‘Block 40’ are meaninglessly floating around in step 24. The rear cockpit components B18 and B5 are not right for the F-16B I was building; use the handle which is on the sprues instead.
- No mention is made of pylons, nor filling the holes for them in the wings. You’re on your own here.
- The dorsal spine aerial is far too big. It’s a sign of how much I did not care for building this kit that I did not bother to replace it with something more accurate.
In short, you need good photos of what you’re making to choose the correct options.
That’s just the instructions. Then there is the plastic.
To cater for the different A and B cockpits, the forward upper fuselage is separate from the rear. Tamiya did it this way to, and they got away with it, (largely) through excellent moulding. Kinetic have not: the fit is not great.
The bane of modelling the F-16 is sorting out the inside of the main intake. If, like me, you’re too cheap to get a resin seamless intake, you’re stuck with multiple iterations of filler (in my case, Milliput and Mr Surfacer 500) and a lot of sanding to make the intake seamless. I built the whole assembly up and painted inside and out as the area between the intake and the lower fuselage is hard to access later. Fitting the intake to the lower fuselage was very hard work, involving lots of shaving of plastic and clamping.
The main halves don’t join around the cockpit. You need to hack away most of the plastic from the underside of the cockpit parts and the inside of the lower fuselage half to get it to (sort of) close. I did think that this was just me, but other builders of the two-seater have commented on it as well. The halves do not go together happily.
I forced the wings together, which was a mistake I should have foreseen, and so ended up with the outer wings bent up, like this was a real falcon in flight flapping its wings. This is because the lower wing is slightly too wide compared to the upper wing. By not checking this prior to fitting the wing halves together I created a lot of work for myself and ended up cutting deep grooves into the wings to bend them down straight to line up with the separate flaps (which don’t fit brilliantly).
In addition to the fuselage assembly, Kinetic also took their engineering cues from Tamiya around the nose and main undercarriage bay. Neither work well. Getting rid of the huge gaps and steps around the nose obliterated the surface detail and I relied upon the paint demarcation to hide this rather than rescribe the detail. The main undercarriage legs have to be installed before the fuselage panel can be added and cleaned up – and it takes a lot of cleaning up. There was a 1mm gap at the rear of the panel that separates the two bays which took a good amount of plastic card and super glue to fill. It’s a shame that this really has to be done after the main paint scheme has been applied.
The main canopy has a more heavily tinted front section than the rear, and this is very evident in photographs. I used Gunze Mr Hobby Smoke sprayed through an airbrush. Of course, I tested this on a spare canopy first, and it looked perfect. When I did it for real, it did not, and there was flerm and other imperfections in the finish. So much for practising.
The front of the canopy has a lot of moulding imperfections in it and when you look through it there’s a lot of distortion. However hard I tried, these would not polish out and so I assume they are internal blemishes. Some stress fractures were also apparent at the front section of the canopy once I’d removed the masking.
Speaking of the main canopy, it’s not a brilliant fit and I ended up with some gaps down the sides. I made the mistake of using some old Mr Surfacer 500 which had thickened up quite a lot. This never dried hard, and so during sanding some got pushed into the cockpit. Consequently, there’s quite a lot of dust on the inside of the canopy, which is a real bummer. Most of the canopy shut lines were filled with super glue and rescribed, except for the front left hand side. This now stands out a bit and I wish I’d used the super glue on this section, too.
When it comes to the markings, there are few question marks. F-16B 920458 ’04’ is very well photographed and you can find lots of photos on the web. The kit markings are from 2009 and celebrate 40 years of TOPGUN (bizarrely noted as ’90th anniversary’ in the instructions). Most photos are from slightly later, with different markings, so if using photos as a reference, make sure they are from the correct time frame. I have found at least three very similar marking schemes that this particular airframe wore, all within a few years. The kit decals include large ’04’ markings which are unused and get you some of the way to modelling the other schemes.
My main concerns centred around the ‘TOPGUN’ marking, which looks too wide to me, and the colours of the greys in the camouflage scheme. Fightertown, who designed the decals, specify FS36375 for the lower surfaces, and FS36320 as the grey in the camouflage scheme on the upper surfaces. I spent ages looking at photos, some very close up around the nose, and I cannot tell the different between the lower and upper greys in the photos. However, I went with the instructions assuming Fightertown know better than me, and to be fair the shades are extremely close. This meant using Mr Color 308 for the 36375 and 307 for the 36320. As usual, they both looked far too blue to me.
The blues are the matching FS shades from MRP. This aircraft is usually photographed in bright sunlight and the colours are very vivid and the blues quite saturated, especially the light blue. The MPR shades are more muted and the grey looks a bit dark. The real thing had a lot of touch up paint over all three of the upper surface colours. I attempted to replicate this with some airbrushing in the relevant areas with darkened shades of the base colours. On at least one of the photos, the starboard wing pylon appeared to have been taken from a brown camouflaged machine, and so this was painted with Hataka’s FS30219. The pylons should have some serial numbers on them, but I couldn’t find anything suitable to use for these.
Since I did not like the ‘TOPGUN’ marking, I scanned it into Inkscape and cut my own mask using a Silhouette cutter. It was easy enough to horizontally compress the O, P, G and N by 0.5mm or so, but the N was more work.
It’s worth noting that the ’04’ markings on the tail are not angled correctly. They should parallel the trailing edge of the vertical tail, which is why the kit decals look odd. I also did not add the ‘CDR Daniel Cheever’ script on the port canopy rail since this was not on the aircraft I was modelling.
Decalling was fairly simple and pleasant, except for the FWS symbol on the port side of the tail. This curled at the edge at the 11 o’clock position. Repeated applications of Mr Mark Softer, Red Daco setting solution and even some Tamiya Extra Thin had only a minimal effect on melting the decal and there is still a blemish where the curl has not been fully flattened.
I replaced the plastic nose pitot with one soldered from Albion Alloys brass tubing and faired in with super glue. I did this right at the end to prevent catching it on anything. Talking of which, I didn’t like the static wick dischargers on the trailing edges of the wings and tail. These were gradually snapped off during the build and then abandoned altogether.
Attaching the landing gear was the usual stress, amplified by the poor images in the instructions that don’t show exactly what goes where. I figured it out eventually. The two pitots (or whatever they are) that attach around the front fuselage are poorly moulded and overscale. The smaller one got launched by my tweezers into goodness-knows-where. I don’t really miss it.
While we’re on omissions, I also lost the front protrusion on the nose gear strut, and snapped off the refuelling light housing on the leading edge of the tail during photography. It was reattached later.
To be fair, whilst this was an unpleasant kit to make, it did get more interesting when it came to paint. The final scheme is very attractive and distracts me from the memories of actually having to put the plastic together. Whilst it was not much of a fun kit to build, the Kinetic kit has two main advantages over the Hasegawa kit, namely full intake trunking right up to the turbine blades and more detail in the main gear bay. But these, in my view, don’t make up for the poorer moulding quality and fit. I’ve built F-16s from Tamiya, Hasegawa and Kinetic, and the Kinetic does come in third in my opinion. The world is still waiting for a decent 1/48 F-16 kit for all the non-C/N variants.
I’ve observed the Kinetic F-16 kits being released from a distance for many years. I’d always been dissuaded from buying them because of concerns over the shape of the nose, and sat alongside a Hasegawa F-16 it is too droopy. But now I’ve built one, my opinion has changed. For me, the problem is less the accuracy and more the fact this is an ugly kit that is no fun to build. I’m glad I haven’t bought any more.
Year bought: 2019 (King Kit, UK)
Year built: 2020 (New Addington, Croydon)
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