As with most of my models, the first thing I did was to assemble some subassemblies. This basically meant the cockpit , wings, and fuel tanks. Fit was very good for these. One big complaint that I have is the way Hasegawa packs the sprues. In addition to the usual scratches, here were also a few parts broken due to rubbing against each other in the single bag that all Hasegawa kits come it. You would think that Hasegawa would have realized that the kit buyer would prefer to have fewer parts per bag. OK, so it is nitpicking, but Hasegawa is supposed to be an industry standard, and I expect nothing but the best from them. Tamiya does a fine job in this area.

Once the major components of the cockpit were glued together, the interior and sidewalls were painted dark gull grey. I then applied the instrument decals over the finely done instrument panel and side consoles. The decal fit perfectly and a small application of Solvaset ensured that they would conform to all the lumps and bumps. It looks great, much better than I can paint! Though not completely done, the interior was glued into the right side of the fuselage.

A bunch of the parts (flaps, racks, landing gear, etc) were pre-painted white. The exhaust pipe and rear engine compressor were painted 'jet exhaust' using Alclad II. It is quite convincing and dries very fast. At this time, the wings were also glued together. You need to open up any holes in the wings for your under wing stores. I opened the ones for the drop tanks and outer pylons. Still not sure about the centerline rack as of yet, but I have time to decide as there is much to be done to the fuselage before it comes time to glue on the wings.

Couple of more items were glued together including the avionics hump that contains a UHF radio, UHF/DF receiver, and IFF Transponder. Fit of this was fairly good, but not perfect. Some filler was required. Same with the drop tanks. In fact, the tail fins are a pretty poor fit, being larger in diameter than the adjoining tank. There is also no positive alignment for the fin section, though there appears that there should be. Much filler and filing will be needed to smooth this out.

Getting back to the fuselage, the engine intake and the exhaust sections were glued together and then glued into the fuselage. Not sure how much weight was needed, I overdidit a bit and glued that into the nose section ahead of the cockpit. Then the fuselage halves were glued together. The intakes are a really neat assembly and the fit of these is very good. Perhaps so good that no filler will be needed (well, not much, anyway)!

As usual for me, I needed some filler on the fuselage halves, more of it in the front than any other place. The avionics hump had been glued together and left to dry. Make sure you open up the required holes for the version you are doing. It was glued in place and any gaps there filled in. I found that the fit to the rear resulted in a rather large gap or two that needed filler. Perhaps if I had not glued the hump together prior to installation, it would not have been there. The fin tip was glued on at this time as well. There is a sink mark on one side that needs filled.

The intakes were painted white on the inside and then glued to the fuselage. Fit was quite good. I found the front of the intakes to be a touch larger than the part where they fit. Some sandpaper took care of that. A small amount of filler was also needed, mostly on the top and bottom. The wings were then glued on and fit was good on one side, but there was a gap on the other. This was filled with Mr Surfacer 500 and sanded smooth. The next parts to be glued on were the gun ports on the wing leading edge. So far, these were the poorest fitting parts. They were smaller than the surrounding parts so needed several applications of filler to smooth in. Once that was done, there was some preliminary painting done. This involved painting control surfaces white. After that dried, I then attached some more additional bits like the under-nose ECM housing and the antenna that fits on the gear fairing. The instructions don't mention having to open any holes for this part so I had to take a best guess and drill some for it from the outside.

First, I painted the flap and slat areas white, then red. When dry, they were masked as were the white control surfaces. The cockpit area was painted black so that this color would show up on the inside of the clear bits. Gull grey and white are the required colors for this kit. I used Testors Modelmaster enamels for all these colors. They went on well with no problems at all. I prefer enamels to acrylics as they seem to be easier to use. Downside is that you have a lot of nasty solvents to use with them, so make sure that you use some sort of respirator when painting. That means a real respirator, not a paper dust mask!