Norwegian F-35
Italeri, 1/72
A hundred doors in close formation... My brother is employed by the Norwegian Government as an aerospace engineer and he's recently been working on a project involving the Norwegian involvement in the JSF programme. The outcome of his report he won't tell me. Bummer. Nevertehless I thought I'd do a model of what that (N)JSF could look like. My brother's been bugging me for years trying to make me do him a desktop model. Believe me I've tried making several, while this one I actually finished, hurriedly, just in time to send it off to him for Christmas. My other efforts are still residing in the basement, my guess is they'll stay there. I used the 1:72 Italeri X-35 kit and built it straight out of the box, with the addition on a figure I found in the spares box, since it was going to be in-flight.
The kit is nice enough, with good fit and nice features i.e. many many opened doors and a downward tilted jet exhaust in the back. I lowered the flaps and slats by scoring and bending the soft Italieri plastic. The detail orientated will recognize the main wheels as the Heller Thunderjet features.. since I lost one of the kit included ones in the battle against time. Though the V/STOL version might not be the most attractive JSF for the RNoAF I thought it would be cool to make it in my own colourscheme and with appropriate low viz roundels. Looking at various schemes around the world I think the Greeks have found a nice way of camouflaging their aircraft. Different blue-grey hues really does the trick against the Aegean sea and sky... so my efforts would be a variation over the theme. Norway is in many areas, especially in the North, mostly blue and grey, with lots of mountains and lots of sea, fjords stretching inland where ever you go. Or fly.
I used a couple of Aeromaster FS greys and that good old USN Blue Grey, just picking out the colours that looked cool, literally. I sprayed them on using my Aztec, and for the first time I also used Parafilm for masking. It takes a bit of experience using the medium, but I though since the kit was for my kid brother I could screw up without thinking too much about it ;-) A coat of Future and then onto the decals. The roundels were taken from a Bell 412 decalsheet made by one of our local hobbyshops, Romerike Hobbysenter, while the 338 Sqn fin flash was taken from a Hasegawa F-16A.
I have many smaller flashes but I thought I'd do like they do in the real world; namely ruin the low visibility idea with a bit of heritage pride... Apparently 338 Sqn will be the first to receive our new fighter, whichever type that might be, and I'm sure they'll find a way to boast about it. As Air Force crew do. Polyscale's very nice flat coat finished the whole thing off. For the stand I used an aluminium tube which fit right in that exhaust, while the bottom plate was bought at a general hobbyshop, found to be perfect for my use. I hand brushed it with Tamiya's "Nato Black", which is a very very dark grey to make a bit of contrast to the black plasticard "NJSF" letters which were crudely cut out and drybrushed with silver.
To add a bit of coulour I cut the different features of the Norwegian standard roundel out of plasticard and hand painted the blues and the reds with Tamiya's gloss colours. Halfway through the drying process I touched the elements with my fingers to mess them up and make them look like they were made of metal and done with enamel like we used to do in the metal workshop at school. The effect was achieved just the way I wanted, so happy with the result I glued the different parts to the plate and sent the whole thing off to my brother's home. I might tell you later if it actually arrived in just three pieces.. The pictures were taken with my fantastic Fuji Finepix digital camera at medium size. It was early morning, I was at work in my control tower with no planes in the air so I played around taking the pictures against an air orientated background.
Text and photos Copyright © 2002 Kyrre Ingebrethsen
Page created August 19 2002.