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F-16N

by David W. Aungst

One day, a friend showed me a 1/72nd scale F-16N he was working on. 

I was never a big fan of the F-16, but I found I liked the look of the camouflage. So, I went to work and, a month later, I had a 1/48th scale F-16N of my own that I could put on my display shelves. Yes, it was that simple. The Hasegawa kit builds up very easily. I built the kit completely out-of-the-box, except for adding an AIM-9L Sidewinder practice round on the wing tip launcher.

The camouflage is the standard F-16N camouflage in which most all the US Navy F-16N's were delivered - Grayish Blue (F.S.35237), Aggressor Gray (F.S.36251), and Light Sea Gray (F.S.36307). After looking closely at photographs, I found that Testors Model Master Light Sea Gray was looking too dark, so I cut it with 40% white. This lightened it enough to look like the pictures.

This was my first attempt at positive / negative markings. The national insignia and the wing walk stripes were masked and painted using contrasting colors of the camouflage. While time consuming, it was not as difficult as I thought it would be, paving the way for me to do other positive / negative subjects.

The decals come from various decal sheets, mostly SuperScale decals. The star on the tail comes from a Russian armor decal sheet. The data on the nose area is from an A-10 "Warthog" sheet. The tail code, nose numbers, and unit identification come from generic lettering and numbering sheets.

I weathered the model the same as most of my other models using thinned enamel paint washes and airbrush shading.

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