Neil Armstrong's F5-D

[Go Flight]

This project all started out after seeing a friend's pictures of this jet outside the Neil Armstrong Air and Space Museum in OH. The image was a white jet with orange highlights. Interesting, I thought and set out searching the the delta wing F5-D in 1:72 (yeah I'm one of those guys). There was nothing in styrene and only Anigrand had one in that scale, which I quickly ordered. One the box came I see I got a different jet. HUH? I look at Anigrands catalog to find the product number to see what happened and - poof - no kit. Arnold must have taken the molds out, saw what bad condition they must have been in and took it out of the catalog.

Long story short, I find one on eBay, and started building. The kit is less than stellar and must have been casted toward the end of the mould's life. But I pressed on. first thing I did was add weights to make sure it wouldn't be a tail sitter -



Getting it together I see that some of the seams will be "B.A.D." -



It's together. Don't look too close. The seams are very much ugly.



More later. Thanks for looking.

 

[Junkie]

Neat project. Tough seam to deal with for sure.

 

[Quaralane]

Definitely a different looking foghter

 

[Go Flight]

The seams were a bear to make invisible. After a lot of filling and sanding, I halfway gave up and just said it's good enough.
Here's the next few pics -
The cockpit installed


The next nightmare was that I went to mask off the canopy. I could see where the frames for the windows were but when I put the Tamiya tape on the marks were so slight that they didn't show up at all!
So my plan was to mask off, just the frame and then take some masking fluid and fill in the glass, then remove the tape and leave the rubber mask -


Nope! the masking fluid never dried. so off came the goopy stuff and I just put more tape over the canopy and cut the tape over the frame off -


I was sort of on with the windows but at this point I'm caring less and less...

Here's the model with the markings masked off -


My next dilemma was that if you look at the jet outside the Armstong Air and Space Museum in OH, it is distinctly orange -


The NASA site shows it as some kind of red -


So I decided to lean a little toward the NASA color -


Next will come the rest of the build AND my home made decals (which I've never attempted before)... Oh Boy...

Thanks for looking.

 

[Quaralane]

I think the difference in color is due to the way the two pics were taken.
But, it's your model, your call to make.

Good luck with the custom decals