SPA Modeler

Here are a couple of picture under construction. The plane has numerous locating posts which are glued to the lower fuselage then fit into holes in the upper fuselage. A couple of reviews have complained about the fit of the top to bottom fuselage. Be sure you dry fit the top fuselage to the bottom fuselage after each series of posts is glued to the bottom fuselage and let it sit mated together till the glue dries. There is some wiggle room fitting the posts and it would be easy to get them out of alignment. My top and bottom fuselages mate perfectly. This is a really nice kit. So far everything has fit perfectly. The only tedious part was gluing the 64 tiny fins to the missiles and decaling them.

This is a big aircraft, isn’t it? Around the same size as a F-15?

Comparing it to my 1/48 F 15C the wingspan is about the same but it is probably a couple feet shorter than the F 15.

Taking notes for when I build mine.

The top and bottom fuselage halves went together with very little problem. I did have to sand down the block that is glued to the front gear housing. It was a bit tall. Possibly the gear housing wasn't seated deeply enough into the lower fuselage but it looks right. We're talking maybe 1.32 inch. I'm going to run into a delay as I have a set of J's Work camo masks to the f 22($7) and Wolfpack's WP48087 exhaust nozzle set($12) ordered from Lucky Model and both are on back order. J's Work is the only Hasegawa F 22 camo mask set I found and Lucky Model is the only place I found them. They ship air mail postage free. The masking set is now in stock and they have one each in stock. They aren't sending mine till the nozzle set comes in because I think they have a $10 min for free shipping. The landing gear is a bit fiddely and were I to do it again I would probably opt for metal gear. All in all The kit is going together well. Some things could be better illustrated-for instance the small doors which are attached to the main gear. The attachment points are not really clearly illustrated and I've downloaded several photos of the main gear area to get a better ideal. http://scalespot.com/walkaround/f22a/f22a.htm has 103 nice closeup photos of the F 22 which can be downloaded to a folder on your computer for easy access.

This really is a very different kind of engineering! One has to glue all those pins in one half, to attach the other half to them?!? Oh boy...