Bilek (Italeri) 1/72 JAS-39C Gripen

BILEK (ITALERI) 1:72 SAAB JAS-39C GRIPEN

Reviewer: Kevan Vogler (rec.models.scale)
Kit Review submitted: 31 January 2007
Also reboxed in the Asian marke by Tamiya (easy to get through Ebay)

Bilek 1/72 Saab JAS-39C Gripen

First of the New Generation:

The Saab J39 Gripen is representative of one of the so called “Fourth Generation” fighters, this group also includes the Eurofighter Typhoon, Dassault Rafale and the Lockheed-Martin F-22 Raptor.

The Gripen was declared operational in Swedish service in 1997, this made it the first of the fourth generation fighters to enter regular squadron service. Its also the first to have secured foreign customers; outside of Sweden, it serves in the Czech, Hungarian and South African air forces. Additionally, examples of the Gripen are flown by the Empire Test Pilots School in Great Britain.

In service, the Gripen has proven itself to be very user friendly for both air and ground crews and very cost effective in procurement, maintenace and training costs for nations with smaller economies such as the Czech Republic and Hungary. While both the Raptor and Typhoon are well known for their lengthy development periods and quite high price tags, the Gripen is securely in service and showing itself to be a viable modern option for nations that must be more conservative with their budgetary allocations.

The Gripen is an attractive, compact aircraft with very impressive abilities for its size. I’ve seen them in person and must say they put on stunning performances at airshows.

On With the Kit:

Upon opening the box, what we find is best described as a slight upgrade to the Italeri kit.

It is an unaltered Italeri kit of the A version Gripen with extras to make it into a Czech air force C version. The extras come in the form of a small photoetch fret and a small but densely packed decal sheet, both by Extratech. Both the photoetch and decals are very good quality.

The photoetch fret contains a replacement main instrument console for the cockpit, new “hubcaps” for the main landing gear wheels, two small blade antennas for the top of the vertical fin and a replacement part to correct the kit’s incorrect APU unit region.

The decals are extensive and contain all national markings and stencils for one aircraft (either single or two seat) and enough extra numbers to make any of the 14 Gripens in the Czech air force inventory.

There is also a small reference booklet with the kit, it is all in Czech, that contains a few interesting pictures and some cutaway drawings.

In short, if you buy this kit, you’re getting a glorified Italeri product.

Beyond the Extras:

As stated above, the plastic portion of this kit is a direct reissue of the Italeri sigle seater gripen kit. To my knowledge, there have been three separate kits in 1/72 of the single seat Gripen; Italeri, Revell-Germany and Airfix. I’m told the Airfix kit is a fair representation of a prototype, but that Italeri’s kit is the most accurate for a production variant.

The parts breakdown is quite simple and the parts count is 88 including clear parts. All major parts are cleanly moulded, flash free with nice engraved panel detail.

Its not a banquet of high detail on first impressions but, like the Gripen, there is a certain attractiveness to the simplicity of it.

The Front Office:

I started my build with the cockpit, which I must say is one of the kit’s two primary weak points. The kit provides an adequate but spartan cockpit and there are aftermarket options to spice it up if you choose.

Pavla of the Czech Republic, produce a decent and fairly inexpensive resin cockpit replacement that fits in with minimum fuss. It also replaces the nose landing gear compartment at the same time, so it takes just a bit of extra work to get the positioning right.

The cockpit also adds a bit of nose weight, which I think is recommendable for this kit. I did some testing to see if it would need nose weight and it looked like it probably would.

Once the pit is in, you can glue the fuselage halves together and move on.

Wings and Things:

The main wing construction is three pieces: the undersides of the wing and the fuselage section between them are one part and the top sides of the wings attach to it.

You will notice on part 9a (left fuselage half) that near the rear of it at the wing root junction, there is a small square hole and the instructions tell you to put part 8a into that hole before attaching the wings to the fuselage. Ignore all this, that is the early configuration of the Gripen’s APU exhaust and is not relevant to the later C version. Part 3 from the photoetch fret is designed to cover the hole and you can do that after the wings and fuselage are together.

Before bringing the wings and fuselage together, I had to tackle the kit’s other major shortcoming, the exhaust and afterburner. These are very over simplified and if used make the exhaust far too shallow and the back end of the plane generally look a bit comical.

To correct this, I purchased Eduard’s Photoetch set 72343 for the Italeri Gripen (make sure you don’t by their set 72298 as that is intended for the Revell Gripen) this set includes among other things, replacement components for the exhaust ducting and afterburner details. You’ll need to install the ducting into the fuselage prior to wing attachment.

If, like me, you only resort to photoetch as a last resort to correct something; the good news is that Aires very recently released a couple of resin replacement sets for this kit’s exhaust woes.

After the exhaust issue was dealt with, the completed wings fit into the fuselage with no issues and no need of filler.

I moved on to the intakes and canards. The intakes are a bit on the shallow side as they are blanked off at the fuselage junction, but they look alright if you paint the blanked off area black before putting the completed intakes on. After dry fitting the completed intakes, I found I had to sand their mating surfaces a bit to get a good flush fit to the fuselage, doing so negated any need for seam filling there.

The canards proved a bit trickier to make fit well. The only locating devices you are really given are small pegs on the canards and little holes on the intake sides, larger flat tabs and slots would have been preferable here as the canards were quite unsteady during positioning. If I had it to do again, I’d make some sort of jig for canard placement.

The radome gave me some confusion over exactly which side is up, its not symmetrical when you look at it from the side and has a slight but percepticle convex curve on one side but is relatively straight on the other. In the end, after getting a close look at a few Gripens at airshows, I decided to make the curved side the top.

At this point, I attached the two piece cockpit canopy. It seems the kit was designed with the assumption that everyone would built it with the canopy open. The front windscreen fits to the fuselage with no issues, but the larger main part takes some work to get it to fit and look good in the closed position. The main canopy part is just slightly wider than the cockpit opening and it does show if you build it with the canopy closed.

The airbrakes are another area that clearly were designed to be built in the extreme open position. You can build it with the airbrakes closed, but my dry fitting showed a lot of filler would be needed and you’d have very noticable and ugly gaps in the prominent actuator fairings if you tried this.

While I’ve never seen a Gripen with its airbrakes open as wide as this kit represents them, I felt it was probably possible they could open so far and decided to not modify them at all. The inside structure of the airbrakes looks good for the scale

After this, the only fuselage detail left was the gun and it fit in its spot with no issues at all.

Weapons:

The kit comes with a few weapons options:

2 x Sidewinder missiles
2 x Maverick missiles
2 x Swedish anti ship missile
1 x Electronics pod

For the Czech version, only the Sidewinders are relevant and the kit supplied ones are certainly useable.

The Czech air force does have Maverick missiles in its inventory, but I’ve yet to see any pictures of a Czech Gripen loaded with them. However, the kit’s Mavericks are generally poor and not worth using so its a non issue.

In addition to the weapons, the kit also includes an auxiliary fuel tank for the centreline station. As the Gripen is a bit short legged in range, its rare to see one without extra fuel.

I have yet to see a Grippen that didn’t have all its various weapons pylons attached all the time regardless if it was armed or not, so if you want to be accurate, put all the pylons on. I found they needed to be sanded just a bit to get a good fit to the wing undersides.

Finer Details:

The landing gear are a fair representation for the scale, but the instructions would have you place all the gear bay doors in open positions. The Gripen’s gear doors stay closed except for gear retraction and extension and ground servicing.

I opted to close most of the gear doors and this does create some problems and extra work with the main gear as you need to file a portion of the forward gear doors away to make clearance for the main gear retracting struts to reach their attachment points inside the bay.

The very tip of the radome is a separate piece that incorporates two small strakes and an overly long pitot tube. I cut off the pitot and replaced it with section of sewing needle. The radome tip does take a little bit of fiddling around to get it to fit correctly.

At this point I attached the completed afterburner from the Eduard photoetch set and I can say after putting that together, the aforementioned Aires resin set is very much welcome if I build this kit again.

The instructions tell you to place the photoetched APU replacement flush to the fuselage area it sits in, but this is not accurate. In reality, the new APU has a noticable hump in it between its forward and aft doors, the modeler is left to themselves to fix that. Unfortunately I didn’t know about that hump until after I had my APU part down on the model.

Painting and Decals:

The painting is relatively simple as the Czech Gripens use the same two grey scheme as the Swedish ones do. However, the kit instructions are a bit ambiguous about colour usage.

I used Vallejo’s #907 Pale Greyblue for the undersides and radome and FS#36270 medium grey from the Agama acrylic range for the topsides and it looks about right.

After a sealing coat of Vallejo’s clear gloss I started the laborious decaling process.

The decals that came in my kit fell apart when I put them in water and I had no luck getting a replacement set from either Bilek or Extratech. Eventually I did secure a replacement set by other means and those decals worked just fine with a bit of Gunze Mr. Mark Setter and Mr. Mark Softer.

For all of the little stencils, it took me four sittings to get all the decals on, but the result was good after a final sealing coat of Vallejo clear flat.

Conclusions and Recommendations:

The Italeri kit itself can be recommended to just about any modeler of any skill level. On its own its not difficult to build and has no real hidden surprizes. I’ve no doubt a complete novice could turn something good out of just the Italeri kit.

Due to the photoetch fret and the extensive decal sheet that is so dense that it leaves almost no room for error when cutting decals from it, I would say the Bilek reissue is best kept for intermediate modelers and above.

Other Observations:

If there is a true downside to this reissue it is that the photoetch fret and Czech markings were made exclusively for it and that Extratech has not made either available on their own.

Given that and that the C and D model Gripens are the current standard of the aircraft, I feel it is perhaps time for a fresh tooling of the Gripen in 1/72 that will reflect the type’s true current appearance.

Italeri did reissue this Gripen kit in late 2006, but it is largely unaltered from their previous releases of it.

Addendum (July 2009):

Since writing the above review, I have had the occasion to replace the Eduard photo etched exhaust and afterburner section with the Aires resin set mentioned in the review and there is a distinct up side and down side to the Aires product:

On the up side, it is a great deal easier to work with than it’s photo etched counterpart. Cutting off the resin pour stubs is easy and quick and it fits into the Gripen fuselage easily after some minor surgery to the kit, the resin parts themselves need no adjustment.

The downside is that you’ll be sacrificing the open airbrakes option in the kit to get the Aires product into the fuselage. Basically, it requires you to remove the airbrake bays to make room for the exhaust section. However, the more adventurous modeler could use the exposed section of the exhaust tube in the airbrake bays as the base to build replacement bay details on.

On another happy note, Bilek has started to put decal and photoetch sets on the market as well as just kits. This means that the Extratech etched parts and Czech air force Gripen decals are now available on the market independent of the kit. This is good news if you have the Italeri Gripen kit and want to make a Czech version. In Bilek’s catalog, the decals and etch are packaged together as product # 72908.

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