Rolling right into my next build I decided on something a bit more involved than the pretty simple Tamiya Wildcat I just finished. I got Eduard's impressive boxing of Hasegawa's F-8E on sale at Squadron.com a while back and have been itching to give it a go. I've always loved the Crusader, but have only ever built one, which was an ESCI 1/72 version built for my very first One Week GB back around 2005ish I think.
The PE and resin included in the Eduard boxing is very nice, and the decals have options for I think five Vietnam era airframes.
I'm not sure yet how I'm going to finish it. Since coming back to the hobby at the beginning of the year, this is still my favorite modeling site by far, but my interests lately have been more towards real world builds with the occasional Whif mixed in. We'll see how this one plays out...if I go RW it will be the colorful CAG bird from the kit decals. Other options I'm considering are RN EDSG over white, RCN EDSG over Sky, or standard USN Gull Gray over white but with Aussie markings. As I said we'll see how it plays out.
I started 10 days off today, but I'm heading for a few days of R&R in Hawaii on Thursday, so after a little work tomorrow it will be on hold until next Tuesday. I'm actually surprised how quickly it's going together. Today I got the cockpit done (easier than I thought with my limited PE experience), and the main gear bay painted and assembled (4 piece assembly with nice details and a little PE). I'm going to build it with the wing down just because I think it looks better that way, so even though I painted the trunking under the wing white, I am not weathering or detailing it. The intake is also together. It went to together nicely with good locating pins in the fuselage. There was a seam, but repeated treatments with White Out (Tipp-Ex for the mother land) took care of it very easily, and since the intake is white it really doesn't take much other than laying it on.
A few pics of the progress so far....
Nice PE for the cockpit.


Main gear bay

All the bits that go inside before it gets joined up. So many pieces to fit together seems a bit daunting, and not shown in this shot its the tail hook bay. But with nothing glued in at all yet it all amazingly falls together and the fuselage dry fits together very nicely. Should have it all buttoned up tomorrow.
