In following you will find some helpful hints & tips to accomplish your Hasegawa 1:48 scale Mitsubishi F-2B. The author started with the 4 part intake trunking which was completely finished before put into the lower fuselage. Despite the instructions that works. Also despite the instructions, you should glue the wing halves first to their according fuselage instead of squeezing the finished wing into the finished fuselage. The author encountered fit problems here.

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The compressor face and the turbine have been taken from Tamiya’s F-16 kit to accommodate a display wire. On the photos, the grey parts are from Tamiya and the yellow ones from Hasegawa. Don’t forget to add weight into the nose. Also you should scratch build a new gun face because the one out of the box is not visible afterwards. Since the aircraft should appear in an inflight situation, the canopy was glued for better alignment to the naked upper fuselage. The back seat seemed to be too tall for the rear cockpit and was shortened about 2mm.

In case you would like to enter the seats in a later stage, at least glue the seat rails into the cockpit and slide the seats down later. Hasegawa expects to glue the cockpits to the lower fuselage. The author also had problems gluing the HUD in place. Decals were used from DXM, unfortunately here they did show to few carrier film and broke apart many times. The display stand was painted in the aircraft colors. Thank You!

Andreas 'Goggo' Gordes

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