Craig Baldwin

Included along side their late summer releases of short nose Phantoms, you will find these Finemolds weapon sets irresistible.

From the link provided and going over various photos, my guesstimate would be the early style without the extra horizontal splitter was for the J79-GE-8 powered airframes. DISREGARD late built RF-4E's rubbish my theory. 😕

It seems a bit of a lighting illusion. The right sides of the both aircraft you can clearly see the light and dark ghost greys, while the bottoms do appear much lighter notwithstanding the false canopy. I'm suspecting they are flying low over snow covered ground and reflecting a lot of sunlight to give this effect. As a subject for my model project and collecting images of the 124 FW I noticed no other out of ordinary painting of their aircraft. Good observation.

Thank you @Guard Hog and @mrvark for your replies. Some digging has pulled up some references for markings of different versions of the AGM-65.

Positions as seen in this photo.

Researching through images of more recent A-10C's and noticing they will carry inert(proper name?) blue striped AGM-65 Mavericks on both left and right wings. Any particular reason for carrying two? Redundancy? Thank you.

Looks like if your a stickler for the details, you will have to use a mirror like metal finish on the front tips of your inboard wing pylons, wing tanks and engine intake leading edges.

A mystery. Borgfeldt use to have sole rights in distributing Tamiya products to retailers in Canada but not sure what there status is now. The Borgfeldt site looks quite primitive now.

The first sprues of the C

Thank you @ya-gabor for the detective work. Modellers are an obsessive crowd. My Googling did not turn anything else up. But my career in aviation has taught me to to believe in anything, especially when it comes to "by the book" applied paint.

Definitely a head scratcher. So they've done this wing walkway for all three aircraft on the decal options in this release? I could see for one, as anomalies of restored birds or even possibly of a screw up on one aircraft but not on all three. And the horizontal tail triangular stab patches are looking like a decal? That would be a shortcut I didn't expect from them. Notwithstanding these revelations, I'm not changing my order.

The Eduard Spitfire IX's are great kits. One of their other releases featured this aircraft on their decals. I had the markings as a left over from my build. Good luck with the build.

As Finemolds finishes it's work on the short nose F-4 Phantoms for release later this summer, enjoy some great photos and history of the Michigan aircraft featured on the F-4C release. Great references. Click on the F-4 Phantom tags to direct you to individual posts. https://oldsargesaircraft.blogspot.com/

Absolutely amazed how many of these are getting in modellers hands before the release.

Just in case you have a few minutes to waste away on Youtube.................

Certainly keeping their options open with the smooth radome, for early C/Ds in service with USAF(and a couple late ANG units) and at least Iran for non-US operators. Not sure how the Korean F-4Ds were configured. For a real early F-4C the weapons set will be needed for the straight inboard wing pylons.

Here is the best picture I could find online of the mesh covered vent section ya-gabor is referring to, upper right in the photo.

Interesting wing walkway on the foreground C. Not to say it never existed like that but just I have not seen that pattern before. Me thinks the builder messed up the decals!?!?!

This particular release has different product number than the usual "FP" F-4 releases. Product # 72843, so I wouldn't call their bluff hoping you will see it for sale again.

Looking at the display layouts, it doesn't look like any new wings are developed for this kit. In the top photo of the new sprue layout, the board is divided in half with the previously developed parts on the upper side including the wings. I've pointed out a section on the lower image where I believe the reinforcement parts for the top of the wing are located on the sprue. Either way it is another step in Finemolds are taking us in the Phantom journey, and I am enjoying it all the way.

Busy work for the Shizuoka show I would assume.

Prepping for the Shizuoka show. I can't imagine this is someone's job.

Perfectly stated.

In the tags beneath the post title 1:72 Revell.

Thank you for the comments. The wing gloves gap is always a nit picker for me. I actually moved the wings very slightly forward to eliminate the gap in the front as well.