F4 PHANTOM RIO COCKPIT SERIES

Like the fuselage, the wings go together with no problems. This 'feature' has been the subject of numerous aftermarket detail sets to put intake trunks into the airframe so you can see J79 compressor faces at the end of the trunks, just like on the 1:1 examples. You'll also see the blankout plates where the intake ducts would be on the real aircraft. The cockpit mounts into the fuselage halves and you can see in the image below that the fuselage goes together without any problems. You can also see that there are a few artifacts in there to show how this cockpit tub is used for other Phantom variants including the floor mount and hole for the rear control stick (not used on Navy/Marine Phantoms) and the lack of a starboard sidewall to cover the retractable air refueling probe bay that is just on the other side of the RIO's right shoulder. In the images below, you can see that there is some nice detailing molded into the instrument panels and side consoles that will really look good with some careful detail painting. If you're putting a crew in your model, you need to use the kit seat and then add lead foil (or whatever) straps to depict your crew properly strapped into the seats. You can see that the basic seat does pretty well though it lacks the harness detail. The gray seat below is the kit seat and the other is an aftermarket seat designed for the Hasegawa kit. The first step was to build up the ejection seats. No fillers or painting will happen so you can see the results without any cover-ups. This build will follow our quick-build format and as always, I'm building this kit straight out of the box with no aftermarket parts and assembling it using Tamiya Extra Thin Cement. We'll focus on the basic airframe and see how well this kit has held up over the years. To keep the kit simple however, they provided a minimum of external stores options and provide a wide variety of external stores in their separately packaged Armament sets. The Hasegawa designers developed an easy-to-build kit that has lots of possibilities.

F4 PHANTOM RIO COCKPIT SERIES

The Hasegawa 1/48 F-4 Phantom II series has remained as the best kits of the subject for many decades and for good reason.

F4 phantom rio cockpit