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ITALERI 1:72 REPUBLIC RF-84F THUNDERFLASH |
Reviewer:
Kevin Ronayne
(kevin.ronayne@nuigalway.ie)
Kit Review submitted:
26 December 2005
Date: December 22th, 2005
As with my review of the Airfix and Italeri Thunderstreaks (published at the same time as this review), I am going to take the easy way out and point you to the best source on the web for the history of the F-84 series: Joe Baugher's F-84 page.
This kit has about 50% commonality with the Italeri Thunderstreak, sharing one of the two main sprues. Like the Thunderstreak kit, the raised panel lines are a bit more prominent than I would have liked, but this is to be expected of a 1970's-vintage Italeri mold. This kit was out of production for years, but was relaunched in 2002 with new paint and decal options. I built the older boxing, which was the only example I had to hand when I had the sudden urge to build an RF-84. As I was finishing up the kit, I came across the current boxing in a model shop, and had little hesitation in buying it. That in itself should give an indication of how I rated the kit. As with the Thunderstreak, cost is not really an issue with this kit - I paid about 10 Euro for it. Actually, I seem to recall that when it was first re-released, the list price might have been a good bit higher, and this might have put me off buying what I viewed at the time as being a quite old and basic kit.
Compared to the Thunderstreak kit, this kit has a new nose section, new wings and wing fences. It just has the one set of drop tanks and pylons. The only real configuration options in the kit are the same as those in the Thunderstreak kit: optional position undercarriage and canopy. The old boxing provided paint schemes and decals for two subjects: a mostly natural metal Italian aircraft, and a camouflaged Belgian example. No unit information is provided. Colour information on the instruction leaflet is generic, but the main paint scheme diagram on the back of the box does refer to FS colours.
The new boxing provides markings - courtesy of an excellent decal sheet - for four subjects, which I must say is very generous of Italeri:
Even if I had the new boxing when I went to build an RF-84, I would probably still have used the old kit, as I was determined to build a Belgian subject. Strangely, while the new instruction leaflet has the same background information as the old leaflet, the technical information has been dropped.
Because the kit is simple, and because much of the build process is identical to that of the Italeri F-84F, I can skip quickly through much of this stage. Firstly, I need to talk about the in-place colour instructions on the construction diagrams. The old and new instructions have different colours for the cockpit - yellow chromate in the old, black in the new. I didn't have the new instructions on hand at this point in the kit build, and I wouldn't have painted the cockpit black anyway. I painted it Hu 140 (FS 36231 Dark Gull Grey), just as I did with my Thunderstreak kits. As with the Italeri Thunderstreak, I also ignored the direction to paint the wheel bays, doors and engine intakes yellow chromate, which was specified by both old and new instructions. I used Humbrol MetalCote Dull Aluminium.
As with the Thunderstreak, the cockpit is all but non-existent, and because there is no tail pipe you need to blank off the rear fuselage. Leaving these issues aside, the fit of the fuselage halves and nose parts are excellent. For the nose section, I dispensed with the small transparencies supplied for the camera ports - the parts are just too thick. Using Humbrol ClearFix is not only easier, but also gives much more realistic results. I tried to position the nose ballast in such a way that it would not be visible through the windows. I also had to use some filler to fully seal off the nose wheel bay.
The wing halves fit well together, but the engine intake splitter plates were too small. This is not too much of a problem, as it is largely obscured once the wing halves are enclosed. The fit of wing to fuselage was not great. The wings fitted into their slots well enough, but left big gaps along the wing roots. After a copious application of filler (Vallejo acrylic is my current filler of choice), all was well. As with the Thunderstreak kits - both Airfix and Italeri - the key to getting the correct amount of wing droop is to attach the main undercarriage legs to the wings beforehand. This is because the legs are molded to mate with the wing at a precise angle, and with the legs attached it is easier to judge the correct wing angle. The wing fences were a poor fit, being crudely molded. Where would we be without filler?
That, believe it or not, is pretty much it. The port wing pitot tube is pretty thick, and could do with replacement. I kept breaking mine off by accident, and eventually replaced it with some plastic rod, although not the thinnest rod available. At one level, I regretted attaching the under wing tanks, as I think the Thunderflash looks much better without them. Maybe that's why I bought a second kit.
The paint scheme on the back cover of the old kit includes FS numbers, but I still needed to be sure - this is an Italeri kit after all! A quick search on Google showed that Italeri had the correct colours for the upper camouflage, but appeared to be wrong on the underside. Italeri gives an upper camouflage scheme of FS 34079 Dark Green and FS 36118 Gunship Grey. In NATO service, these colours were referred to as NATO Dark Green and NATO Dark Grey respectively. However, according to the references I consulted, the finish should be semi-gloss and not matt, as the first digit of the FS codes is '2' and not '3'. I will come back to this point.
Italeri gives the underside colour as FS 36440 Flat Gull Grey, but my references pointed to a quite different colour, NATO PRU Blue - based presumably on RAF PRU Blue. The FS match for this colour is given as 25109 - semi-gloss (aka satin) again. This colour may have been later replaced by a bare metal finish on some RF-84's.
I took the view that my Internet references were correct as to both the underside colour and the overall finish. Interestingly, the Hunters in Belgian service would have carried a very similar upper camouflage scheme (of RAF origin), with almost identical colours and the same satin finish. For the upper camouflage, I used the 'matching' paints Hu 116 (FS 34079) and Hu 125 (FS 36118). For the underside colour, I had no exact match - there are a couple of Xtracolor matches, but I don't yet have them in my Xtracolor collection. I used Hu 157 Azure blue, which I reckon to be a quite close match. Of the three Humbrol colours, only Hu 125 has a satin finish, so the model was coated in Humbrol SatinCote once the decals were applied.
© Kevin Ronayne 2005
The drop tanks add another wrinkle to the paint scheme equation. The old Italeri instructions portray the tanks being painted in the same way as the aircraft proper. This is the route that I followed, obviously using Hu 157 as the underside colour. Some photographs on airliners.net show RF-84's fitted with tanks painted in a different scheme, all dark green on top with a different demarcation. The Italeri demarcation is right along the middle of the tank, but on these photographs the tanks had a wavy demarcation positioned much further down. A likely explanation is that the tanks were painted to match the USAF 'tactical' camouflage scheme which was also used on European-operated Thunderstreaks and Thunderflashes.
Returning to the current boxing, it is possible that the French subject carried the same 'NATO standard' paint scheme, down to the satin/semi-gloss finish. However, French-operated aircraft of this period are not my strong point, and it is possible that the French, like the Germans, went their own way when it came to camouflage schemes on aircraft brought from abroad.
The old decals were produced by Cartograf. The decals are in excellent register, but have poor adhesion, which was always a persistent problem with the decals that Cartograf printed for Italeri. Despite both the satin surface and my use of a decal-setting agent, I still had some silvering on a few decals. The newer decal sheet is produced by Italeri's current decal producer, Zanchetti, and Zanchetti decals are noted for their excellent adhesion, registration and well, just about everything.
By the way, there is a 'gotcha' on the old sheet: there are no decals for the Belgian fuselage roundels, even though undersized roundels are shown on the paint and decal guide. I raided the decal sheet from one of my new Revell Hunters to get suitable decals.
I have only a couple of comments here, which I suppose counts as a good thing. I suspect that some of the camera ports are either the wrong size and/or in the wrong position. This is something that I picked up when I was trying to work out where exactly the demarcation line should be on the forward fuselage. Comparing the kit, the diagrams and actual photographs all seemed to give slightly different answers. In such a scenario, the photographs are right, and everything else is wrong, although not by much. Secondly, I don't see any sign of machine gun ports - the RF-84F had two .5-inch machine guns mounted outside each intake, and the ports should be clearly visible. Again, this omission is not much of a problem, as the holes can easily be drilled out based on reference photographs.
© Kevin Ronayne 2005
As this kit is the 'only game in town', there is little I can say here. The kit is old and basic, but it's a pretty honest kit. If you like the Thunderflash, then you should enjoy this kit. As with the Thunderjet and Thunderstreak, the range of European operators might make it an attractive subject for some major kit manufacturer. This would especially be the case if molds could be shared between kits of the Thunderstreak and Thunderflash as Italeri have done.
As mentioned at the top of the review, Joe Baugher's F-84 page is indispensable. Joe's home page is a wonderful textual resource for anyone looking for detailed histories of US military aircraft. For pictures, it has to be airliners.net. The IPMS Stockholm web site has two articles on the RF-84: Republic RF-84F Thunderflash in Detail and Republic RF-84F Thunderflash in Detail (Reprise) . The first article dates from 1999. The second is from 2002, and was prompted by the re-release of the Italeri kit.
My search for colour information threw up a page on Camouflage Colours for Norwegian Military Aircraft. Much of the colour information in this article has applicability to the aircraft operated by other NATO countries. IPMS Stockholm came up trumps again with an article on the Republic RF-84F Thunderflash in Belgian Service , which reinforced what was in the Norwegian reference as well as adding new information.
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