my favs are F`s

Howdy. I was missing from the forums from quite some time too and it was a blast catching up. What a nice Phantom conversion!

That's some clean neat painting work! GJ!

+1 🙂 I was about to comment something like ''What a cockpit! I'm joining the party quite late but I'm happyt to see it done'', then I saw that it was an incomplete topic from 3 years ago. What a build anyway!

Here are the pics in a ''landed'' mode, with landing gear down, canopy open and, of course - the wingtip tanks. 🙂

Awesome weathering, and a lovely plane. Congrats on the model!

10x a lot! 🙂 Eastern, yep, this is indeed real alluminum foil. Only the darkest panels in the tail section are with a combo of Alclad II metalizers. ExchefAndy, thanks much for keeping track of my journey - next up, I thought it is finally time to make my first ship, and I already started it. It is the DDG-1000 Zumwalt destroyer in 1/350 😊 and I love it.

I'm adding another Starfighter to the topic. 🙂 My newly finished 1/32 F-104G with USAF markings...

And, Da Zipper is ready. 🙂 I only took pics in in-flight mode and hopefully with the landing gear/canopy open soon (in parked mode.... which kinda looks like a different model). Here is the full gallery so far. Hope you like it, and Thanks for the feedback, tips, bits of advice, etc., a lot! Cheers!

And some zoomed-in photos where you can count the bolts/rivets if you want... 😄 But they are not too much indeed. I compared just about every rivet line with photos of the real plane. Most stencils are easy to read as well. The weathering is 95% entirely from the treatment of the NMF. Merely 5% is from real weathering with oil paints after the lacquer coat. The only things I plan to add are the two wingtip tanks...

Finaly she is ready - the G-variant with US markings, from the time when the German fighters went to the Luke AB for training, etc. This is almost entirely NMF finish - my first time doing something like this, and I like it quite a lot, but... prooobably I wouldn't do it one more time. 🙂 I don't know... I'd like to make a proper US Starfighter (C-variant) one day. I hope you like the in-flight pics, and here is the WIP topic. The landing gear and the canopy can open for a parked display, but I managed to take photos only in in-flight mode so far. So, these are only in flying mode.

The Piece de la resistance is also ready. 🙂

Yeah, this thing is almost mental! Amazing!

It's difficult to believe that the ''rivetting'' is done. I used so many different and new methods to me, that are difficult to describe too. I also finished with the painting of the different colors - mainly white and black, and some dark alluminum/steel/magnesium (and concoction of them) for the discolorated panels. And she's ready for decals.

Oh yes, another shiny NMF F-104... 🙂 About the ''green'' instructions - I think they mean you should not scrape off the plastic details, and instead add the decals on top of these plastic details... to make them pop up just a bit more. 😉 Anyway, we are talking about so small parts that any difference would be almost impossible to see, especially if you add the wiring/cables over the boxes.

Almost finished with this NMF... So, I glued the wings, and there were two major issues - 1) the wing root joints were at a 90ish-degree angle, and there must be a smooth transition with the fuselage, so I did it with some filler on both sides. 2) there were gaps between the fuselage and the flaps, while on the real pics - there is almost no light that can be seen, which was a realtively easy fix. Here is this area before: And after the edits: The ''additional'' alluminum parts are also covered in NMF, but they still n