Done - F-4EJ Kai Phantom - The Last of it's Kind ZM 1/48

[DocRob]

Sayonara F-4 EJ and welcome Señhores to a new WIP.

The Phantom has been there all my life, at least it felt like. When I was a kid, we often spent our holidays in the north of Germany by the sea, where the land is flat and the Phantoms were flying very low, often with supersonic speed. You can imagine, I was deeply impressed. First there was this roaring sound becoming louder and louder, than one or two F-4's passed and than there was the bang, how cool, except for the people living there.

I have an Eduard boxing of an F-4 in my stash, with a lot of goodies, but when I saw the ZM Kai Phantom with the farewell livery, I was immediately sold and felt the urge to build promptly.
I love the disco glitter blue markings, which are well represented on the huge Cartograph made decal sheet. There is a second sheet with markings, stencils and fabulous Instrument panel decals.

Now a few month later, the Kai sneaked onto my bench and I started to build.

 

Browsing through the box is pure joy, everything is well packed and the grey plastic has very sharp details and no flaws of any kind. The manual is a bit over informative in places and shows every detail from various angles, but misses some tiny bits of information, but this is nitpicking. I preferred the color printed manuals of the 32 scale birds of ZM, but like the Phantom's plastic way more than the sometimes soft detailed sprues of my long ago built TA-152.

What's really missing are seat belts, which I bought from Kits-World, canopy masks, which were purchased from New Ware and as an add on some Res-kit burner cans.

Next up, cockpit and engines.

Cheers Rob
 

[DocRob]

First, I cleaned all the cockpit parts, which are very well detailed, with lots of raised detail. I glued the tub with the side panels, but left the instrument panels off for easier painting and decaling. Most cockpit parts were sprayed with Tamiya's dark sea gray and then gloss coated for decaling the consoles and IP's with the supplied decals.
The decals worked superb with the help of Micro Set and Sol and a hairdryer. They conformed to the raised details and look at least as good, as colores PE. With the added levers and bits, I prefer the representation to flat PE.

Here the decals are still unsealed and glossy, after application.

Cheers Rob

[DocRob]

The next step was sealing the decals with a matte coat, adding and painting levers and control sticks, along with some detail painting. I used a sharpened toothpick for the first time for painting of knobs like the red ones on the control sticks and various knobs on a side panel.

Sorry for the lousy picture quality. I promise to use a tripod for detail shots more often. I reviewed the pics, when it was too late and the fuselage was closed.

Cheers Rob

 

[Martinnfb]

Fantastic  work, super clean.

[DocRob]

1 minute ago, Martinnfb said:

Fantastic  work, super clean.

Thanks Martin, it's my first go at decaling cockpits, but given the great quality of the decals, there is no real need for AM here.

Cheers Rob

[Peterpools]

Rob

Bravo .. awesome start on the Big Guy. Terrific work and detail painting on the office - looks so good.  I have my ZM F4J sitting right next to the bench as there are (were) a few more builds to be done before I was going to pick her up again and finish. Some how I have the feeling done in my bones, as I intently follow your build, my ZM Toom will be rolling out on the bench pretty much after the Tomcat is done..

Keep 'em comin

Peter

[GusMac]

Wow, great result with the decals Rob. I honestly didn't believe you'd be able to get such a cool finish with them, but that looks as good as any 3D decals or such.

[DocRob]

12 hours ago, Peterpools said:

Bravo .. awesome start on the Big Guy. Terrific work and detail painting on the office - looks so good.  I have my ZM F4J sitting right next to the bench as there are (were) a few more builds to be done before I was going to pick her up again and finish. Some how I have the feeling done in my bones, as I intently follow your build, my ZM Toom will be rolling out on the bench pretty much after the Tomcat is done..

Thank you Peter, nothing against these iconic two seaters. I'm not much of a jet guy, except some of the very early ones, but a F4 or F14 keep me tempted, along with some grubby Russian heavy metal like the Mig-31 I built some years ago.
I don't know, if the ZM kit is holding up to Tamiya's standards, but to me it looks pretty good and well worth to be build.

Cheers Rob

[DocRob]

11 hours ago, GusMac said:

Wow, great result with the decals Rob. I honestly didn't believe you'd be able to get such a cool finish with them, but that looks as good as any 3D decals or such.

Thanks Gus, I was actually lying, when I answered Martin, that this was my first pit decal job. My Mig-31 turned out ok with the supplied decals, but the Cartograph decals of the ZM Phantom are superior. They are great to work with and are robust enough for the treatment. The only difficulty is placement. You slide the flat decal onto a well protruding surface and then you have to shrink it in place. It's hard to foresee the correct positioning, before shrinking the decal into place with heat and solutions. One or two of mine are slightly off, but it's barely noticeable.

Cheers Rob

[DocRob]

Finally, I glued the fuselage halves together, after checking the fit of the cockpit. No problems here, the fit is very good. There is a spine insert for the back of the fuselage, which is very clever, as there is no seamline to be dealt with.
I added the nosecone and some intakes and fairings, most of them specially designed for the Kai Phantom, therefore to be found on an extra sprue for this edition.

... and some decent shots of the cockpit from a tripod with is a necessity at least in these smaller scales.

Cheers Rob

[Peterpools]

Rob

Some mighty nice progress on your ZM Phantom. Phantoms and Tomcats just happen to be one of those model aircraft that do not need any nose weights as the main gear is so far aft. ZM does that a very different approach to the front office as compared to Tamiya but both have raise the bar to a very high level and each use the "spine plug" eliminating the nasty top fuselage seem. 

Keep 'em comin

Peter

 

[GusMac]

10 hours ago, DocRob said:

Thanks Gus, I was actually lying, when I answered Martin, that this was my first pit decal job. My Mig-31 turned out ok with the supplied decals, but the Cartograph decals of the ZM Phantom are superior. They are great to work with and are robust enough for the treatment. The only difficulty is placement. You slide the flat decal onto a well protruding surface and then you have to shrink it in place. It's hard to foresee the correct positioning, before shrinking the decal into place with heat and solutions. One or two of mine are slightly off, but it's barely noticeable.

Cheers Rob

Hadn't really thought of that Rob, but trying to predict if they'll shrink symmetrically isn't straightforward with all those different shapes and bumps.

If there's any mis-registration it's certainly not noticeable in these pictures.  

[Bomber_County]

Rob, you’re motoring on this one. I loved building my ZM F4 and it was my first jet ever, so steep learning curve. Really clean build as ever….one thing I didn’t do was study the coloured diagrams adequately and messed up on the red this, white that but that was on a US version……..looking forward to the next instalment….also loved the decals supplied as well…..

[harv]

Rob, she is nice so far! ....harv

[DocRob]

On 12/22/2021 at 8:21 PM, Bomber_County said:

Rob, you’re motoring on this one. I loved building my ZM F4 and it was my first jet ever, so steep learning curve. Really clean build as ever….one thing I didn’t do was study the coloured diagrams adequately and messed up on the red this, white that but that was on a US version……..looking forward to the next instalment….also loved the decals supplied as well…..

Thanks Phil, it's a fun build with good engineering and fit until now. You are right about the manual though, it's a bit overdone for my liking, showing every little detail from tree different angles at least. Color would help with color, if ZM had printed their manual in color, it would have been a breather, so it's a bit confusing.
 

Cheers Rob

[DocRob]

Next on my build are the engines, which I will substitute with Reskit burner cans. The kit parts are not bad, but the resin detail is far superior and thinner which represents the real thing better.
There was some cast block cutting necessary, which was simple with most of the parts, except with the cage like parts on the lower right side, which proved to present a little challenge. Due to bad packaging, the spider like right PE parts were broken and I won't use them.

The Reskit burner cans protrude into the fuselage, so it is necessary to leave the supplied jet engines out and perform some advanced test fitting to see, if everything lines up. The diameter of the Reskit nozzles is maybe a millimeter to large, It's a close fit, but maybe, I have to remove some material.

By the way, I checked the wing fuselage alignment and how the air intakes fit. I have to say, I'm amazed about the tight fit, with a submillimeter wiggle room to close small gaps, that's the way, I like it. The front edge of the air intakes is also thin enough for my liking.

The Kai Phantom takes shape with the help of some tape.

 

Cheers and a very happy Christmas

Rob

 

[Peterpools]

Rob

Love those burner cans - the details are amazing. The fit of the intakes and wings are nice and tight and look amazing.

Fantastic progress

Keep 'm comin

Peter  

[GazzaS]

Seems I've been sleeping Rob, while you have been working diligently with very fine results.

[DocRob]

5 hours ago, GazzaS said:

Seems I've been sleeping Rob, while you have been working diligently with very fine results.

More like Christmas celebrations, I guess. Actually working on this kit is fun and there is so little time at the moment. I hope in some days, there will be more bench time, but until then, it's Christmas (and post Christmas) time with good eating, some surfing and swimming to counter the nightly drinking .

Cheers Rob

[GazzaS]

26 minutes ago, DocRob said:

More like Christmas celebrations, I guess. Actually working on this kit is fun and there is so little time at the moment. I hope in some days, there will be more bench time, but until then, it's Christmas (and post Christmas) time with good eating, some surfing and swimming to counter the nightly drinking .

Cheers Rob

I wanna see a picture of you with or on your surfboard.

[DocRob]

3 hours ago, GazzaS said:

I wanna see a picture of you with or on your surfboard.

Pretty curious / suspicious, those guys from surfers paradise .
This year was a very bad year surfing wise, I was in the waves maybe 15 times, last year, there were maybe 100 sessions. The good thing on my island is, you have the waves almost for yourself, the bad is, it's because the waves are mediocre at best. We have perfect waves from the north and the west very often, but due to the rocky shape of my island there are no even slightly save spots. Only yesterday, two tourists died on two different places of our north shore, because they were swept from the cliffs by huge waves.
I have to go to where it's halfway save and that's the east, where the waves are mostly formed by wind and have bad quality and often more than one direction .

Since I normally surf alone I found no actual pics and lots of times, I use the bodyboard, because you can have more fun in lesser quality waves. In the moment it's a bit wild in the north, as mentioned above and too small in the east, but my son is here for a week, who is a surf instructor and we will try to catch  some waves with him the next days.

All I found is an old pic taken in Portugal some years back, when I was a bad surfer (I started with 42 years) and in mediocre physical shape (Berlin livestyle and work ).
Luckily, I'm in better shape now and a better surfer too, at least in the sense of the Gentlemen's Hour written by Don Winslow).

Here I picked my Portugal custom made board up in Tenerife five years ago. 

Board at home, well close to home, as it's home is the sea.

Cheers Rob

[Peterpools]

Rob

Looking pretty cool. I do remember 'back when' I was close to your age but time has marched on and never stops. Enjoy the waves and riding the waves (hope they still say that).

Keep 'em comin

Peter

[Bomber_County]

Dead jealous now Rob, so wish I could retire……..happy new year may all your waves be good ones…..

[DocRob]

3 hours ago, Peterpools said:

Looking pretty cool. I do remember 'back when' I was close to your age but time has marched on and never stops. Enjoy the waves and riding the waves (hope they still say that).

Thanks Peter, I'm not that young anymore, being 56 now. Surfing has changed for me surely with age, but you can compensate lesser power and agility with better wave selections, due to experience. Another good thing, being more mature is, I don't have to prove anything. When surfing in Portugal, I met people, who were surfing with 75 years of age. I hope, I can do that as well. 

Cheers Rob

[DocRob]

3 hours ago, Bomber_County said:

Dead jealous now Rob, so wish I could retire……..happy new year may all your waves be good ones…..

Don't be Phil, surfing on my island can be less satisfying, than having to build, lets say an Italeri kit . The waves are often a messy affair combined with fierce winds (surfers do hate wind), where I go into the water only for physical exhaustion, knowing there is not much to gain in the way of riding waves Hawaiian style.
Often the next wave is nearer to you than you think Phil. I don't know about your area, but Cornwall definitely has better waves than my island. Give it a try in a good surf school, it's fun and there is no better beer in the world as a post surf beer, to erase the salty taste in the mouth.

Cheers Rob