Saber Exile

As the final coat of Future dries on my Phantom I regret that I am, quite literally, a day late and a dollar short. :crying2:/> This was my first GB experience, and I must say that it set the standard for many more to come! The encouragement and support from the rest of the group was a great reminder as to why I got back into the hobby. Thank you for allowing me to participate, and next time I will not let real life interfere so much with my model building :whistle:/>

As Bon Jovi once said, "Life is just what happens when you are busy making plans." In this case, actual events of the past few months seemed supernaturally bent on taking every opportunity to finish this build away from me. However, real life has finally loosened its grip on me, and I am back in the workshop. I have had to play a large amount of catch-up, and in the span of two days I have been able to assemble most of the major components and get down to painting. What I am left with when the dust settled late Sunday night was this: Tonight will see me back in the shop once more...

Apologies for not updating regularly, but April has been a pretty busy month. I was released from the hospital last week, so now that I have a permanent modeling location I can get down to some serious work! The canopy fix seemed to do the trick, with liberal amounts of Krystal Klear filling up the gaps and allowing a decent basecoat of paint to be applied. Thankfully the flat black will hide some of the imperfections: I can see where I'm gonna need to invest in a better camera than the one that is on my phone... Unfortunately, the rest of the airplane is in the process of a comp

I couldn't find anything in my research to indicate whether that flight went supersonic or not. However, I did some map mathematics with some help from Google Earth and came up with this: Distance from Fargo, ND to Stanford, CA: 1,255 nautical miles (straight line distance from Hector Int'l in Fargo to Moffett Field in CA) According to Aerofax #4, the ferry range of an F-4D (I don't have the one for the C model) is 1,602 nautical miles. In the story it was stated that seven hours had elapsed from the moment the heart was harvested to the moment it arrived at the hospital. I dunno how long

You guys tried to warn me about the canopies....I should have listened! After all was assembled, I found that there are some serious gap issues, not to mention the front ejection seat prevented the canopy from seating properly. :bandhead2:/>/> However, I'm too far into the assembly to turn back now, so I'm trying out some Kristal Klear to bridge the gaps. When it's all dry I'll remask to compensate for the 'added' canopy frame As for the ejection seat issue...some creative sanding and repainting fixed that problem. Here's today's progress so far:

Things are starting to pick up a bit as I have had a few uninterrupted evenings to make some progress. Last night marked another milestone as the cockpit halves were joined after going crosseyed trying to detail an ejection seat that was going to get mostly covered up. Here is where I stand as of 26 March:

Funny you should mention that.... http://www.ndguard.ngb.army.mil/news/guardian/Archived%20Guardian%20Publications/JetLetter-May-June2007.pdf (The pictures are on page 8-9) Looks like they may have commemorated that airplane, as the one in the pictures is painted ADC gray consistent with 119th Happy Hooligan Phantoms of that era with the name of the Lt. that flew the mission on the canopy. The tail number is a bit of an enigma though, because according to Phantomshrine.co.uk, it doesn't exsist, and Joe Baugher's database has that tail number belonging to a Shrike missile :dontknow:/> -

The Phantom as a humanitarian? Sure! I stumbled across this article while researching something else. Now I'm trying to find out the serial # of the plane that flew this unique mission: In 1986, an F-4 Phantom II was used by the North Dakota Air National Guard to transport a human heart from Fargo, ND to Stanford, CA in time to save an infant's life. Here's a link to the whole story: http://www.1af.acc.af.mil/news/story.asp?storyID=123058688 Quite possibly the only time a Phantom payload delivered to its intended target actually saved its life. -James

You can use this with general modeling (I like to use it to check alignment and seam fit), and the image is remarkably stable on the screen when holding the scope 'freehand'. As far as working with XP, I don't have any experience in that department as my laptop is a Win 7 machine. One problem I did run into was that I absolutely had to load the drivers from the included disc. The magnification program did not recognize the scope after windows automatically installed drivers from the internet. I will admit that the Amazon product details are sketchy as all getout. I had to educate myself

I can tell you the one that I have is made by DigiMicro, and it looks like it came straight from Hong Kong. I have to say that I was really nervous about whether or not it would work, but it was the only one I found that actually stated that the focus was to infinity (really important if you plan on mounting it more than a few inches above your work area). There are some that are cheaper, but at forty dollars I would be hard pressed to find something else that is as good. There are tons of them at Amazon.com, but their product descriptions leave out a lot of good information like screen re

Pookie, Don't give up the ship quite yet! I am in much the same boat that you are in with having had my near focus vision decay to the point of uselessness. After talking with a vision therapist, I found that I could still build models, I would just have to retrain my brain and use some off-the-shelf technology. Here is what I did: I always have a laptop at my workstation so that I could listen to music, watch movies, etc. during my builds. A quick trip to Amazon.com netted me a USB powered microscope for about forty bucks. It is manually adjustable, and it displays whatever I have it

Okay, so I'm not really accomplishing things as quickly as I thought I would. However, progress is being made. Here is where I stand as of March 6th: I have managed to lay some groundwork in the cockpit tub, as well as do some initial fleshing out of the instrument panels. The ejection seat parts were treated to the same basecoating as well. Assembly so far has consisted of closing up all of the underside doors and joining the two fuselage halves. Now that the paint and glue have dried, it's time to get back at it! -James

I plan on displaying it in flight, is there a vendor that offers a one-piece canopy? Thanks! James

I'm loving that sharkmouth! This is gonna sound like a rookie question, but is it available in a decal set? -James

This was my first Phantom, and the build that awoke my model interest out of a thirty year slumber...