Completed Review - Hobby-Boss F9F-2 Panther - Part 2

Scale: 1:72, RRP - £11.99

It's been a while since I started this kit and to tell the truth it's also been a while since I finished it, I've just not got round to writing about it. In fact it's been so long I've forgotten most of the build process, so I'll keep this short.

Carrying on from where I left off, I seem to remember, the cockpit fitted well but it was essential to add some weight to the nose. However the odd part was the nose wheel assembly, it was required to fit this into the wheel well at an early stage which meant for the duration of the build you had to be very careful not to bend or break it.

As I recall the fit was really good, two halves went together and the wings fitted with no issues. The final step was to add the fuel tanks to the wings, again that was straight forward. The only issue was the cleaning up of the parts where they'd been attached to the sprues which I'd mentioned previously.

And now it time to begin painting, which took a couple of attempts as I was having my usual issues with Tamiya paints, in this case XF-17 (Navy Sea Blue) which was the main colour for this aircraft. Of course this no reflection on the kit, just my lack of experience using Tamiya paints.

Now the next part I do remember well, the decals. They were good quality, I don't think I had any major issues getting them on the model. However the big issue with them is that in my opinion they're not to scale! I compared photos, other kits and even the decal guide contained in this kit and I can confidently say they're oversized. This was especially apparent on the nose where it was quite difficult to squeeze them into the available space.

Once the decals were on I could add the under wing ordnance and this was another strong point of the kit . There was plenty to choose from, although I think if you added all the bombs you'd probably have an aircraft that would struggle to take off!

With that in mind I opted for a mix of bombs and rockets and it was done.


I have say that really liked this kit. For me it was a good introduction to Cold War era jets and the kit combined with the Eduard photo-etch made a very nice model that went together well. Pity about those decals...

Overall Build Score: 3.5 out of 5, an extremely nice kit, full of detail but let down by the oversized decals.

Build Review - Hobby-Boss F9F-2 Panther - Part 1

One of my my objectives for the year had been to build an early Cold War era jet in 1:72 scale. I'd originally expected to build Tamiya's F-84, however this kit from Hobby-Boss caught my eye, especially when I saw it for sale for just £4!

I'd previously only attempted one of Hobby-Boss's Easy Kits and so thought this would be a good time to try a "proper" kit and was pleasantly surprised at what it had to offer. On the sprues the parts looked detailed and sharp and there were two decal options, one Korean War era US Navy aircraft and one later Argentinian Navy option, presumably one that was sold off when the US decided they no longer needed them.

A while ago I'd removed a few parts from the sprue and have to say the sprue layout was not the best. There were several badly placed sprue tabs attached to awkward locations, in some cases attached to the very thinnest parts of the kit. This made the parts fairly difficult to remove without damaging them.

But that aside it was time to get started, and where else, but with the cockpit. In this case I was to enhance it with Eduard's self-adhesive zoom set (SS398). There were some fantastically small but detailed parts but I felt with the bubble top canopy it was worthwhile as most of this would be visible. I have to say the self-adhesive sets haven't been as adhesive as I'd expected them to be. On flat surfaces they will stick, elsewhere I found I needed glue.

Paint wise, I brush painted with my now custom interior green Citadel paint mix.

I'm sure you'll agree, it looks really good, well worth the effort!

Completed Review – Hobby-Boss MiG-3 Easy Kit (80229)

Scale: 1:72, RRP - £5.99

The MiG-3 has been on my wish list for a while now. I had originally intended to build the Zvezda kit, based on the fact that Zvezda are Russian and so they surely must be able to produce a reasonable kit of a Russian icon. How wrong I was!

The Zvezda kit is actually a rebox of the frankly awful Revell kit which looks more like an abominable mix of a MiG-3 and Dewitine D.520. So this left me with the other option in 1:72 scale, Hobby-Boss's Easy Kit version.

I'm a bit sceptical when it come to "Easy Kits". While I appreciate the idea behind them is to get people into building models I do think the concept is somewhat flawed. Assembling a kit is only half the story and in my opinion painting a kit is always the more difficult part of any build. All I see easy kits as being is a quicker option of beginners reaching a point where they abandon a model because no-one provides them with an "Easy Paint" option to accompany the build.

Putting aside my thoughts on the easy kit part I was well aware that this kit was well regarded in the modelling community and so I was determined to see why.

On opening the box I found two large solid parts, the fuselage and the wings, a sprue of smaller parts and a clear sprue. The shape looked good, like a MiG-3 which was encouraging, even if the smaller parts did look a little soft on details and the plastic felt a little flimsy. Decal options were for two aircraft, one winter scheme, one summer scheme (although it should noted there's no way the red arrow decal will fit over the exhausts on the winter option).

To build it was a case of clip the fuselage to the wings, add a piece below the engine and you're just about there! Glue isn't necessarily needed for the larger parts but this isn't a snap fit kit either. There is, to my surprise two canopy options, one open, one closed. However the cockpit is a bit lacking in detail, if you're a scratch-builder then you'll probably feel the need to do something more with it. In my case I opted for the closed version so just chose to add some masking tape seatbelts and left it at that.

Total build time, including cutting and glueing...48 seconds!

From then on it was simply a case of finishing of the model prior to painting. Landing gear was a little on the weak side and I decided to leave off the rockets and only attach the launchers to the wing. All was fairly straight forward, living up to the easy build. Detail wise it's almost spot on, they even included the asymmetrical oiler coolers on each side of the engine! The only accuracy issues that I really noticed were a few missing panel lines and the doors to the tail wheel (there should be a leather cover rather than the doors).

As for painting I touched on that in a previous post, including my first airbrushed canopy. As it happens this model was actually serving as a tester for my new airbrush and so I picked a colour scheme similar to that of the P-51D I was working on. For the top colours I used several coats comprising of Tamiya's XF-62 (Dark Green) and XF-51 (Khaki Drab) and mixes of the two. For the underside I didn't really have any paints to hand that reflected a light VVS blue and so I used AS-7, Grey, which probably isn't as accurate as it could be.

Finally the decals, they were surprisingly good. There are two complete sets so the leftovers are going in the spares box, a man can never have enough good quality spare red stars!

The final result:

So I have say this kit far exceeded my expectations. Bearing in mind this is an easy kit and so I have to judge it on that basis Hobby-Boss have managed not only to produce an easy kit, but one that is more accurate than it's mainstream competitors. For this they have to be commended. Out of the box this is more than passable kit, and it's one with plenty of potential for extra detailing (albeit scratch-building).

I will hopefully revisit this kit at a later date as I practice working on panel lines, but for now it's done.

Overall Build Score: 3 out of 5, a complete surprise! Expensive for an easy kit but accurate beyond any of it's (non-easy kit) competitors. Either a good simple build or a more than worthy foundation for detailed build.